It was "noble, revolutionary—and probably the most thoughtless of the many
acts of the Great Society." Thus did Theodore White, chronicler of all that is
brave and optimistic about America, assess in 1982 the thing his country had
done to itself seventeen years earlier. He was not talking about the decision
to increase the commitment of American ground forces to South Vietnam, nor
about the beginning of programs that would end in racial quotas and
school-busing orders, nor about the inauguration of Medicare and other benefits
whose costs the public would in the 1980s be struggling to pay. Rather, this
most thoughtless gesture was the Immigration and Nationality Act amendments of
1965.

The new laws were not expected to increase the flow of immigrants to this
country. Indeed, for the first time in America's history, they put limits on
the numbers that could enter from Mexico, the Caribbean, and elsewhere in the
Western Hemisphere. But the laws did revolutionize the nature of the immigrant
population. Back in the 1920s, when the U.S. first placed limits on the number
of immigrants it would accept, the central principle of immigration policy was
that America's new citizens should resemble its old ones. Under the
"national-origins" system introduced in 1921, quotas for European immigration
preserved the "racial preponderances" within the American population. Ireland,
for example, could send each year 3 percent as many immigrants as there were
foreign-born Irish-Americans counted in the U.S. Census of 1910. (In 1924, the
quotas were made more restrictive. They were set at 2 percent of the ethnic
representation among Americans, foreign-born and native-born, shown in the 1890
Census. ) The national-origins system was designed as a shield against the "New
Immigration" of Poles, Italians, Slavs, and Eastern European Jews.

With the Immigration Act amendments of 1965, the United States announced that
it would look impartially on the world. The Ethiopian, the Turk, the resident
of Calcutta or Rangoon, would compete on equal footing with the Englishman and
the German. America would open itself not merely to the tired and the poor but
to the racial and ethnic balance of the wide world. The result, wrote Theodore
White, was "a stampede, almost an invasion." The "sources of fresh arrivals
[would be] determined not by those already here, but by the push and pressures
of those everywhere who hungered to enter."

Those pressures are sobering to contemplate. According to the International
Labour Organization, the total labor force of the Third World countries will be
600 million to 700 million people larger in the year 2000 than it was in 1980.
To employ all those additional workers, the developing countries would have to
create more jobs than now exist in Western Europe, Japan, the United States,
the Soviet Union, and the other industrialized nations combined. Obviously,
that will not happen, and some of those who cannot find work, especially in
Latin America, will decide to leave.

"Especially" Latin America because the riches of the United States lie within
easy reach of so much of Central and South America, and because population
growth there is exceptionally fast. The combined population of the Latin
American nations was about 150 million in the early 1950s. It is expected to be
845 million by 2025. Half of the people in Latin America are eighteen years old
or under; they will be entering the labor force, looking for work in their
countries or ours, in the next generation. Robert Fox, of the Inter-American
Development Bank, points out that the total Latin American labor force is now
about 115 million, but will be 197 million twenty years from now. "This is
intractable," he has said. It is based on a population already born. Latin
American countries would have to create an average of 4 million new jobs each
year until 2025 [to accommodate the growth]. The U.S., with an economy five
times larger, averages 2 million new jobs per year."

Regardless of these projections, the flow of immigrants from the Third World
has already begun. From 1930 to 1960 about 80 percent of America's immigrants
came from European countries or Canada. From 1977 to 1979, 16 percent did, and
Asia and Latin America accounted for about 40 percent each. In 1979, the nine
leading "source" countries for legal immigration were Mexico, the Philippines,
Korea, China and Taiwan, Vietnam, India, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, and
Cuba. In tenth place, with 3 percent of the total, was the United Kingdom.

The structure of the immigration code meant that the Third World's share of new
Americans was likely to increase. Under the post-1960 law, places in the
immigration queue are assigned with grand indifference to ethnic origin but
with careful attention to family ties. The immediate relatives of American
citizens—parents, minor children, and spouses—are admitted without limit. In
recent years, some l00,000 people have entered this way annually. In addition,
the law provides for 270,000 immigrants each year (no more than 20,000 from any
one country) in the "numerically limited" categories, which heavily favor less
immediate relatives. Eighty percent of the 270,000 places are allotted to the
adult children or the brothers and sisters of U.S. citizens, plus the immediate
relatives of non-citizens who are here as permanent resident aliens. The
remaining places go to those with skills considered valuable to the American
economy, or to those who would simply like to come. The law's premium on family
connections means that each new arrival from the Philippines or Korea
eventually makes many others in those countries eligible for admission.

Beyond this change in the mix, there has been a change in numbers. In 1980, at
least 125,000 Cubans and Haitians arrived in southern Florida and were admitted
as "special entrants," a category invented to cope with the influx. Since 1975,
the U.S. has accepted over half a million refugees from Indochina. More than
160,000 came in 1980 alone, which together with the Cubans and Haitians pushed
that year's total for legal admissions to 808,000, the highest in sixty years.

And this is to speak only of lawful entrants. As Latin America's population has
grown and its governments and economies have foundered, more and more of its
people have looked northward for relief. In the mid-1970s, the commissioner of
the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Leonard Chapman, said that there
might be as many as 12 million foreigners here illegally. Official estimates
are now 50 to 75 percent lower than that, but no one can say with confidence
how many illegal aliens are here and how many more are coming. In many of the
big cities of the north, throughout the southwestern states, and in the
labor-intensive farming regions of the east and west coasts, daily life
provides signs of the illegal tide. Early this year, the attorney general of
the United States, William French Smith, proclaimed, "Simply put, we've lost
control of our own borders."

As the immigrants continue to arrive, the alarm bells have begun to ring. From
liberals and conservatives alike have come warnings about the implications of
the trend. Clare Booth Luce, the venerable Republican, has said that the
immigrants will be more difficult to absorb because they are not white. Carl
Rowan, a black Democrat, has written about the "immigration nightmare." Ray
Marshall, secretary of labor in the Carter Administration, has claimed that we
could worry much less about unemployment if we got rid of illegal immigrants.
Jesse Helms and Paula Hawkins, two of the most conservative members of the U.S.
Senate, have argued that if the U.S. doesn't help defeat the guerrillas in El
Salvador, we will be flooded with Salvadoran refugees, as we were with refugees
from Vietnam. Labor leaders have issued statements saying that immigrant
workers are stealing Americans' jobs.

"Our immigration policy is making us poorer, not richer" Richard Lamm, the
Democratic governor of Colorado, said this year. "It is dividing our wealth and
resources." Last year, Lamm contended that America's economic "pie" had stopped
growing and that "the unchanging pie dramatically alters an issue like
immigration, for now additional people will have to take from that pie rather
than contribute to it. . . . Who needs additional people when we cannot employ
our own citizens?"

After many months of travel through the parts of the United States most
affected by immigration, it is clear to me that something big is going on. To
see Koreans, Vietnamese, and Cambodians contending for places with the
Mexicans, Salvadorans, blacks, and "Anglos" of Los Angeles is to glimpse what
New York must have been like when Ellis Island was more than a monument. To
examine Miami's recent economic, political, and social history is to see Cuban
and Haitian immigration as the event around which all others turn. In countless
other places, from Brooklyn to rural Wisconsin, from Houston to Orange, New
Jersey, the words heard in the air, the clothes and faces seen on the street,
the courses taught in the schools, have all changed because of immigration.

But it is far from clear to me that the changes under way are ominous or bad.

The best-known "facts" about today's immigration are, in many cases, not facts
at all. Because of the 808,000 people who were admitted legally in 1980,
politicians and authorities have suggested that the U.S. is experiencing an
unprecedented foreign flow. A well-respected immigration expert, Michael
Teitelbaum, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has written in
*Foreign Affairs* that "immigration and refugee flows to the United States in
the late 1970s were at or near the highest levels ever experienced...."

This is hyperbole. The year 1980 was the recent peak. One year later, after the
Cuban and Haitian boatlift was over, and after the greatest surge of
Indochinese refugees had passed, legal immigration fell to 697,000. By
contrast, it was 1.2 million in 1907, and exceeded one million in five other
years near the turn of the century. Today's figures do not include illegal
immigrants, but the figures from the turn of the century (when there were few
illegals) do not include anyone who arrived legally by ship in cabin class or
by land, from Canada or Mexico.

Since the American population was so much smaller early in the century, the
relative impact of immigration was far greater then. From 1880 to 1890, and
again from 1900 to 1910, the average annual flow of counted immigrants was
equal to more than one percent of the American population. From 1970 to 1979,
it was *one-fifth* of one percent. The foreign-born made up 4.7 percent of the
population in 1970; they made up 8.8 percent in 1940 and 14.8 percent in
1910.

Many politicians and experts assert that the U.S. is unique in its
vulnerability to immigration. Governor Lamm, for example, says that "the
unemployed...will never get jobs as long as we continue to take in twice as
many immigrants as the rest of the world combined." The "twice as many"
calculation simply fails to count nearly one million Ethiopian refugees who
have fled to Somalia (a nation of 4 million people) and the 1.5 million Afghans
displaced into Pakistan. In normal years, the U.S. does admit more immigrants
and refugees than any other country, but Canada and Australia have accepted
more relative to their population sizes. From 1956 to 1978, the U.S. never
received more than 2.8 legal immigrants for each thousand in its population.
During the same period, Canada's rate was as high as 17 per thousand, and
Australia's rate was as high as 15.1.

Yet statistics are at best a crude indication of people's real concerns about
immigration, and a statistical rebuttal is not enough. "It is difficult to
explain to residents of the community that the Indochinese refugees are drying
skinned cats out on the clothes line because they enjoy cats as a delicacy in
their country," the mayor of Santa Ana, California, told a congressional
committee in 1981. It is difficult to feel at ease about the impact of the new
arrivals, difficult to guess whether the cultural fabric will stretch, as it
has before, or finally be torn.

The unspoken question about the immigrants is *What are they doing to us?* Will
they divide and diminish the nation's riches? Will they accept its language?
Will they alter racial relations? Will they respect the thousand informal rules
that allow this nation of many races to cohere?

Economists who study the effects of immigration take two very different
approaches. One school views immigrants primarily as additional people—new
workers in the labor force, extra purchasers in the national market. From this
perspective, immigration can sometimes be valuable, if the labor it provides
alleviates a shortage. Thus Western Europe needed immigrant "guest workers" to
ease its labor shortage in the 1960s. And thus, contends the economist Julian
Simon, immigrants can help the United States. The value of immigrants Simon
says, is that they "represent additional *people* as people...[and] lead to
faster economic growth by increasing the size of the market, and hence boosting
productivity and investment." In addition, since so many of the immigrants are
young, they can help offset the aging of the American work force. Most of those
who see immigration from the labor-market perspective conclude, unlike Simon,
that immigrants hurt a mature economy like that of the United States. If the
immigrants are uneducated and unskilled—farmers, peasant craftsmen—they will
drag down the overall productivity rate. They will, in effect, more narrowly
divide the economic pie.

The other economic approach pays little attention to how many immigrants
arrive. It concentrates instead on the economic behavior of those who survive
the process of migration. This view is propounded by economists who place great
stress on "human capital," the mixture of talents and cultural incentives that
makes Germany economically different from England and Hong Kong from Macao.
From this perspective, the ingenuity and perseverance that immigrants possess
can make an economy richer, because immigrants will adapt and innovate and
sacrifice in ways that non-immigrants are too comfortable to try. They make the
pie larger for everyone to share.

I came to find the second approach more realistic, for reasons I can best
present through the story of the Nguyen family, formerly of Saigon, now of Los
Angeles.

In 1975, the four brothers and six sisters of the immediate Nguyen family lived
in Saigon with their parents plus the extended family of nephews and
brothers-in-law. The father ran a small import-export business. The children
held clerical or professional jobs. Two were in the Army of the Republic of
Vietnam (ARVN); one of them had been a law student before he was drafted. One
son was an architectural draftsman, and one was a lawyer. Two daughters worked
as secretaries, one in a South Vietnamese government ministry, the other at the
U.S. Embassy. Although the family was not part of Saigon's moneyed elite, it
was respectably successful. Because of the daughter who worked for the
Americans, the family was on a list of people the U.S. planned to evacuate if
Saigon fell.

In the chaos that engulfed Saigon in April of 1975, the onetime law student,
Mr. Nguyen, was the first of the family out of Saigon. (He has asked that his
given name not be used) How did he escape? "In panic," he says. He made his way
to Tan Son Nhut airport, where the rescue helicopters were supposed to land. He
was thirty years old and spoke no English.

Mr. Nguyen was taken to Clark Air Base in the Philippines, then to Guam, and
eventually to a resettlement base at Camp Pendleton, California. There he spent
the next six months. In camp, he volunteered to work for the U.S. Catholic
Conference, which was (and remains) heavily involved in resettling refugees. In
time he came to be paid $5 a day for helping to coordinate the many details in
finding homes for the refugees. When the camp closed, at the end of October,
1975, he was the last refugee released.

Across the vast expanse of the Los Angeles basin Mr. Nguyen traveled in search
of work. His first break came in November. In El Segundo he found work as an
assembler in a waterbed factory, for $2.10 an hour, then the minimum wage.
After Mr. Nguyen had accepted the job, the foreman asked him for his address.
"I told him I didn't know, because I didn't live any place yet. I was only
going to rent a place after I got a job."

Mr. Nguyen had his first foothold, but not much more than that. He was taking
home less than $400 per month, and was paying $120 for his room. On leaving the
camp, Mr. Nguyen had been entitled to $300 for resettlement expenses, but he
had refused the money. "I had pride. I wanted to feel that I had made it
without any help," he says. "But I felt lonely and miserable. In those
factories, you can't slow down." He was buoyed only by his glimpses of other
Vietnamese adjusting to industrial life. "You see one person in the corner, he
might have been a farmer in Vietnam. He survived, I can survive."

Three weeks later, he heard of another possibility, an opening with RCA. On his
time off, he went to the RCA record factory and said that he'd had experience
with studios and music back in Vietnam. The personnel man listened with feigned
attentiveness and told him that he sounded like the man for the job. When Mr.
Nguyen reported for work, he found that he would be putting labels on records
for $3 an hour.

"I learned that money is really valuable in this country," he says. "You pay
for it with blood and tears. I started thinking about that $300. Money is
money. Why not collect it and put it in the bank and earn interest instead of
just ignoring it?"

Having steeled himself to claim his resettlement bonus, Mr. Nguyen went into a
religious-charities office to apply. While there he ran into the resettlement
director, who knew of his work in the camp. The charities were looking for a
man like him, she said. Mr. Nguyen started to tell her he couldn't speak
English well enough, but she shushed him with the reassurance that he'd be put
in a training program. The pay would be $660 a month. He accepted. By the end
of 1975, Mr. Nguyen was a white-collar worker.

Meanwhile, the rest of the family has adapting to life in the newly christened
Ho Chi Minh City. Nguyen Ninh, the brother who had been a draftsman, escaped
purges directed at other technicians because, as he remembers now, "they needed
our skills to make the machinery run." Yet he suspected that sooner or later
his usefulness would end. One of his brothers named Viet, had been a lieutenant
in the South Vietnamese Army and was being held in a "re-education camp." When
Viet escaped from the camp, after two years' detention, he joined Ninh in a
plan to flee the country.

With friends, the brothers bought an old boat from country people and then
covertly brought it to the city to fortify it for an ocean voyage. None of them
had been on the water, but they tried to teach themselves seamanship. One night
in 1977, they set out, seven people in a boat that Nguyen Ninh says was not
more than twelve feet long.

They hoped to reach Malaysia, but the winds blew hard from that quarter. On the
eighth day at sea, the boat's engine failed, and they drifted where the wind
pushed them.

"After the broken engine, we figure 99 percent that we die in the ocean," Ninh
said this spring. "Nearly everyone who goes in a boat dies." Commercial ships
passed, but they kept on going, some even adjusting their course so as to avoid
entanglement with the troublesome boat people. The boat began to leak, and then
it sank. The men were in the water, swimming, reckoning their remaining time in
hours.

In the distance, a large, dark shape loomed. It was a freighter from Kuwait.
Its captain, looking through his binoculars, was startled by the sight of men
swimming in the ocean. When rescued, they were 200 miles from Vietnam.

They had avoided death, but for the next year the two Nguyen brothers lived as
stateless men. Immigration officials would not let them go ashore at the ship's
next stop, Singapore. They lived aboard ship till it returned to Kuwait, and
when it got there they were jailed. Its next voyage was to Vietnam, they were
told, and it would take them back home. The brothers tried to reach embassies,
the Red Cross, the UN, but they got nowhere until a sailor agreed to mail a
letter to Mr. Nguyen in California.

With efforts under way in Los Angeles and Kuwait, the men were classified as
refugees and, after three months in jail, were turned over to the UN. They
spent eight more months in a UN refugee camp in Greece, where they worked as
farm laborers. After Mr. Nguyen was certified as their sponsor in the U.S.,
they were accepted as refugees. On June 22, 1978, they arrived in America.

Like their brother, they spoke no English on arrival, but they began learning
as they looked for work. Beyond supporting themselves, they hoped to send money
to the family members still in Vietnam, to help them buy their way out. Viet,
the former ARVN lieutenant, got a job at a valet-parking outfit at the Los
Angeles International Airport, for the minimum wage. Ninh became a carpenter's
helper. A few months later, he found a place as a trainee draftsman with a
machine-tool company.

Four sisters and a nephew were the next Nguyens to come over. They went by boat
to a refugee camp in Indonesia. In 1979, they joined their brothers in Los
Angeles.

Then the other two sisters escaped. One, Hai, had been a student; the other,
Mai, had worked at the U.S. Embassy. In 1980 they set out on foot. With two
children, they traveled west to Cambodia and then walked for seven days through
the jungles of Cambodia to the Thai border. In Thailand, they were admitted to
a refugee camp. There they stayed for six months. In 1980, with Mr. Nguyen
acting as their sponsor, they entered the United States. They were among the
808,000 admissions that alarmed many Americans that year.

The family with which they were reunited had changed dramatically in the
previous five years. Mr. Nguyen had become a citizen and was married to another
Vietnamese immigrant. He and the other brothers were established in a way that
would have been hard to imagine when they first arrived, as dispossessed
persons. They had assimilated so fully as to see that in Southern California in
the late seventies, the road to financial independence was real estate. After
Ninh and Viet arrived, in 1978, the three brothers had pooled their money in
hopes of buying a house. Each of them was eventually bringing home about $1,000
a month; by sharing living expenses, they saved about $2,000 a month. By 1979,
they had accumulated enough for a down payment on a house in Downey, a
respectable middle-class suburb. All three signed the mortgage.

Viet had saved enough money from his work at the parking lot to buy a small
furniture store, too. As he was contemplating the investment, he told Mr.
Nguyen that it would consume all his savings. Mr. Nguyen replied that if he
lost the money, he could always earn it back, but if the gamble paid off, he'd
be independent. Ninh was by then earning $10 an hour as a professional
draftsman.

Mr. Nguyen, the Benjamin Franklin of the family, encouraged his sisters to
train for better jobs. Hai took a course in accounting and wound up working for
a Vietnamese dentist in Long Beach. Mai studied cosmetology. She did not like
it, but her brother pushed her to see it through. She finished, and found a job
in West Los Angeles. She made the sixty-mile commute daily, and by the end of
1980 she was earning $2,000 a month doing nails. By 1982, she had a chance to
buy her own salon. The family pooled its assets and took out loans, and now she
runs Mai's Beauty Salon, in Beverly Hills, hard by Rodeo Drive. The family's
father finally arrived, having first escaped to Belgium and established himself
as a baker.

All the while, Mr. Nguyen was improving his own position. He rented the house
in Downey to other members of his family, eight siblings and in-laws. They pay
$100 a month apiece, which covers the mortgage. Mr. Nguyen has moved with his
wife to a second house. They have carefully worked out their financial
timetable. In a few years, they will have retired the second mortgage on their
home, and his wife can quit her job as a chief bank teller to have children.

When I went to visit the house in Downey, home to nearly a dozen people,
counting the children, I was prepared for a sense of confinement, or of brave
endurance amid squalor, or of practically anything except the serene order I
found. It sits amid other unexceptional, modern California houses, with a vista
of a distant freeway, on a street like a thousand others in the Los Angeles
basin. Inside the house, the sisters and brothers, arriving late after long
commutes from their farflung businesses, changed quickly into Vietnamese
pajamas and kimonos and took their leisure in the living room. Delicately
colored prints of Asian scenes hung on the walls. The dining table stood on a
platform with a canopy overhead, giving the effect of an indoor gazebo. The
only external indication of the struggle for advancement going on within was
the seven cars that jammed the driveway and lined the curb.

The adults, thin and short, spoke in heavily accented English about their
arrivals, which in some cases were only a year in the past. Two elementary
school children, whose father was still in jail in Vietnam, appeared in
American-style pajamas and shyly answered questions in American tones. The
family is still saving money, in preparation for the mother and for the spouses
and siblings yet to arrive.

Mr. Nguyen's job involves assisting many new arrivals from Indochina. He tells
them that they must adjust to the "new life" in the United States, as his
family has done. He warns them against welfare, although he says he cannot
blame people for accepting the $600 a month, plus food stamps and medical
benefits, that welfare provides. "I tell them, If you go on job training, you
will learn the English faster. Welfare will make you lazy. You will hesitate to
work and hesitate to speak English."

The Nguyen family is, of course, not typical of all immigrants. Its members,
with their education and their white-collar backgrounds, started out several
steps ahead of the peasants and farmers who fled at the same time. The refugee
camps, however cheerless, and the resettlement bonuses, however small, were
more help than many other immigrants receive. Most important, the Nguyens'
status as legal, fully entitled participants in American society made it easier
for them to establish credit, buy homes, start businesses, and move up the
ladder rung by rung.

Still, there is something in their story that is typical of immigrants'
histories. However hard it was to continue living in Ho Chi Minh City (or, in
earlier eras, Pinsk or Palermo), it took a certain daring to set out in the
boat or walk through the jungle. At worst, the emigrants would die or be
captured. At best, they would arrive as uprooted foreigners, ignorant of the
language and the mores that compose their new culture.

Some theorists speculate that the act of emigration is a kind of natural
selection: those who are passive or fatalistic—or comfortable—do not take the
step. Others suggest that the rigors of the passage teach the immigrants the
skills they need to survive. In any case, there is little dispute that an
"immigrant personality" exists, and that its elements are the same ones that,
in retrospect, are so apparent in the nation's previous immigrants.

Compared with people who have not been forced to land on their feet, immigrants
are generally more resourceful and determined. (A twenty-three-year-old man
from El Salvador, who had come to the U.S. illegally and was working in
Houston, told me that he could not understand all the talk about unemployment.
Why, he himself was holding three jobs.) The full story of the immigrant
personality would also include the psychological burdens of dislocation. But
looked at from the economic point of view, the immigrant's grit and courage,
and even his anxieties, impart productive energy to the society he joins.

This is different from saying that immigrants are valuable primarily for their
specific talents. Some are, of course; the harvest ranges from Albert Einstein
to Rod Carew. But through American history, the great masses of immigrants have
not brought with them special skills. Most have come from the lower, but not
the bottom, ranks of their native societies. They are people without advantages
of birth who are nonetheless on the way up.

"Those who do come to the United States are those who are advancing within
their own societies," says Ray Marshall, now of the University of Texas; "those
who have attained the necessary knowledge of America and how to get here, and
who have accumulated or been able to borrow the funds they need to pay for
their airline tickets or to pay their smugglers."

The single most important quality in immigrants is the willingness to adapt.
The very traits that persuade someone to move from Guatemala to Los Angeles, or
even from Detroit to Houston, often enable the immigrant to find and fill
economic gaps, which is what the Nguyen family did, and what many other
immigrants have done.

Not every immigrant becomes an entrepreneur; a man who pushed a hand plow in a
Mexican village will probably pick vegetables or wash dishes if he comes to the
United States. The more temporary the visit, the more likely the immigrant is
merely to sell his unskilled labor, rather than look for a special niche.
Economists distinguish such "sojourner" behavior from the attitude of the true
immigrant. It typified many Italian sojourners in the United States eighty
years ago and French-Canadians in New England until several decades ago, and
probably typifies most illegal immigrants from Mexico in recent years.

Still, there is evidence beyond the anecdotal about the economic benefits
immigration can bring to the new homeland. The Urban Institute, which has been
conducting a study of the California economy in the 1970s, recently released
its preliminary findings:

During the 1970s, when Southern California received more immigrants than any
other part of the country, it also created jobs faster than any other, and its
per capita income increased by 25 percent, also higher than the norm.
Immigration was far from the only factor in these increases, the study
reported; but, it said, the findings suggest, "at least at the aggregate level,
that large-scale immigration did not depress, and perhaps increased, per capita
income in the state"—that is, it did not divide the pie. On balance, the study
said, the economic benefits to the region—results of the new human energy, the
entrepreneurship, the adaptability— outweighed the costs, which primarily came
from the immigrants' use of public services, such as hospitals and schools.

Although immigration is a divisive issue in Miami, almost no one disputes the
economic bonus the Cuban community now represents. The first to flee Castro
were mainly professionals and businessmen, who soon repeated their success
here. The second and third waves were less select, more like America's other
immigrants; the first-wave Cubans grumbled that those who had lived under
communism had lost their drive. Still, they were absorbed into Little Havana,
where they opened shops and restaurants and kept the town alive. Miami's Cuban
population has helped make it the entrepot for Latin American trade, to the
occasional sorrow of the Drug Enforcement Administration, but to the
satisfaction of financiers.

Immigrants eagerly join the American race to get ahead. According to Barry
Chiswick, of the University of Illinois, the sons and daughters of immigrants
earn 5 to 10 percent more than others of the same age and educational level
whose parents were native-born. The immigrants themselves, compared with
native-born people of the same race and with the same amount of schooling,
start out at a big earnings disadvantage. But, in a matter of years, even the
first generation catches up with and then passes the native-born. This
"earnings crossover" occurs after fifteen years for Mexican immigrants and
after eleven for black immigrants. According to Thomas Sowell, a conservative
black scholar, second-generation black-skinned West Indians in the United
States have a higher average income than native-born white Americans.

Those opposed to immigration respond to these tales of success with three
objections.

The first is demographic. One by one, immigrants may add to the national
wealth, but collectively they frustrate efforts to limit America's population.
Arguments about the ultimate "carrying capacity" of America's farmland, water
supply, and other natural resources have been muted in the past decade, as
American fertility rates have fallen. But many who are concerned about
population growth naturally believe that each new immigrant puts ecological
equilibrium that much further out of reach.

Those who advance this case often claim that immigration now accounts for half
the total increase in the U.S. population. That is almost certainly not true.
During the 1970s, the American population grew by less than one percent a year.
The roughly 4 million legal immigrants admitted during that decade accounted
for 21 percent of the growth. In comparison, the population grew by 2 percent
per year from 1900 to 1910, and immigrants accounted for 40 percent of the
increase.

If legal and illegal immigration combined did, as many environmentalists
assert, account for half the increase in the 1970s, then there must have been
more illegal than legal immigrants during that period. No one familiar with the
subject believes that so many came. Lawrence Fuchs is a professor at Brandeis
University who was executive director of the staff of the Select Commission on
Immigration and Refugee Policy, the government body that in 1981 recommended
changes in immigration law. The Census Bureau has estimated, he says, that in
1978 between 3.5 million and 6 million illegal immigrants were present in the
U.S. Fuchs says, "Since we know that some of those have been coming since long
before 1970, and since we also know that a large proportion of them are persons
who go back and forth and are definitely not permanent residents, it is clearly
fallacious to assert a number such as 50 percent without carefully qualifying
it."

The demographic argument cannot be dismissed. But if immigrants bring
adaptability to an economy, they may thereby increase the chances of finding
new ways to use and conserve resources. Environmental concern means that we
must strike a balance between two competing virtues: a sustainable population.
and the invigorating effects of immigration. Too many of the environmental
activists sound as if immigration is an unrelieved evil.

The second objection concerns international equity, even morality. It starts
with the premise that immigration is a naturally selective process. Precisely
because immigrants are so industrious, it is argued, the United States should
not be skimming them from the poor nations of the world. Roger Conner, the
executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR),
told a congressional committee in 1981 that the 808,000 legal immigrants and
refugees admitted the previous year represented one five-thousandth of the
population of the world. "Out of 5,000 impoverished people, we took one, taking
the brightest, most able, most energetic, the best organized," he said. "We are
taking the cream of each social class by the standards of their society...."We
are taking the most energetic and talented."

In a human family of great riches and greater deprivation, a country as
comfortable as the United States has an obligation to help. But of the varied
ways in which America might advance the interests of poor countries, closing
the door on their people seems one of the least effective, direct, or fair.

"We never heard this argument from experts in economic development or from the
developing countries themselves," says Lawrence Fuchs. "We only heard it from
Americans who oppose immigration."

Third, many people object to immigration because of the Americans it hurts.
Overall, the nation might gain from immigration, they concede. But the benefits
go to the most comfortable Americans, and the costs are absorbed by the least
powerful and privileged.

Roger Conner is one of the foremost apostles of this view.

Conner is a compact, sandy-haired lawyer, thirty-five years old, with a
puckishly all-American look. Like many other lobbyists in Washington, he seems
to be struggling to resist grabbing his listeners by the lapels so as to be
sure they'll hear all he has to say. In the past, he channeled his enthusiasm
into the environmental movement, but, he says, he came to feel that immigration
was the biggest environmental question of all. For the past four years, as
executive director of and chief spokesman for FAIR, he has been asking
Americans to re-examine their assumptions about immigration.

Conner is exasperated by the notion that you can understand the effects of
immigration by looking at the immigrants. "They are the last people you'd want
to talk with," he said this spring. "Of course it's been good for them.
Especially for the first ten years, they will work very hard. But what no one
ever does, when they're out talking with the aliens and hearing their success
stories, is talk to the people who are paying the price."

Conner admits that most people may profit from immigration. The immigrants
themselves do, and so do those Americans who don't compete with immigrant labor
and therefore are free to enjoy its blessings. The benefits include fresher
food (picked by immigrant field hands, instead of by machine), more pliant
domestic service (provided by Mexican maids), smaller bills in restaurants
(with Salvadorans in the kitchen), and lower prices for new houses (because of
lower pay for the construction crew).

Whom does that leave out? In Conner's view, those who pay the price are the
black teenagers, the white working-class fathers, the ambitious children of
maids and janitors, who are just as eager as any Vietnamese or Mexican to move
up the ladder but who find that the rungs have been knocked out. This is a
disaster for them but not, Conner says, for the classes that make the laws and
run the businesses.

"If the illegal aliens were flooding into the legal, medical, educational, and
business occupations of this country, this problem would have received national
attention at the highest level and it would have been solved," the labor
economist Vernon Briggs, of Cornell University, has written. Lawrence Fuchs
says that according to public-opinion polls the college-educated are the only
group in favor of more immigration.

The economic argument against immigration is particularly troublesome for
liberals. It pits the rest of the world's poor against the two American groups
thought to have the most to lose from increased immigration: unionized labor,
which says its wage levels would be depressed, and young, unskilled blacks, who
would be nudged out of place for entry-level jobs.

At this point, it is important to emphasize the distinction, not always clearly
stated, between legal and illegal immigration. If one were searching for the
pure immigrant spirit, the place to look would be among the illegals, for every
one of them has overcome some obstacle in order to be here. But because they
cannot compete fully in the aboveboard economy (they have no legal redress if
underpaid or mistreated; they have difficulty getting loans or rising into the
white-collar world), their climb up the occupational ladder ends early. More
important, from Conner's perspective, they put unfair pressure on the American
citizens competing for similar jobs. A man outside the law will accept working
conditions a citizen would not—and should not. Once the illegal immigrant has
the job, the citizen must choose between accepting similar conditions or going
without work.

What kind of work do the illegals perform? According to some academic theory,
and to the folk wisdom of the Southwest, immigrants do the jobs that Americans
"won't" do. Michael Piore, an economist from MIT, has developed a model of a
"dual" labor market: some jobs are so dirty, so onerous, so poorly paid, that
if immigrants were not there to take them, the jobs would not exist. Therefore,
the immigrants who are filling them have not really displaced anyone else.

"People say, 'Why aren't blacks like the Haitians?"' says T. Willard Fair, the
president of the Urban League of Greater Miami, where Haitians now hold many of
the maid and bellman jobs in which blacks once got their start. "'Why don't
they want to work?' The Haitians are behaving the way we did thirty years ago.
We would work for anything, take any abuse in the workplace."

To most of those directly involved in the industries where illegal immigrants
concentrate, it seems obvious that no one else is lining up for the jobs. Last
December, Merle Linda Wolin, of The Wall Street Journal, went to see a number
of businesses where illegal immigrants had been rounded up during the spring of
1982 in Project Jobs, a short-lived sweep against employed illegal
immigrants.

At a furniture factory in Santa Ana, California, on a railroad-construction
gang in Texas, in a food-processing plant in Chicago, and at other sites of
hard work, Wolin found that American citizens had in fact turned up for the
jobs when the immigrants were gone—but soon afterward, they had quit. The pay
was too bad; unemployment compensation was, by comparison, an attractive deal.
Former truck drivers and carpenters found it humiliating to sweep parking lots
or to keep up with a racing assembly line. By the time the *Journal's* reporter
arrived, six months after Project Jobs, the plants were again full of illegal
aliens. A team of researchers, headed by Wayne Cornelius, the director of the
Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at the University of California, San Diego,
found a similar pattern in California. "The attitude of many young people is
that this is the dirty work of society," Cornelius has said, "and that people
born, brought up and educated in the U. S. shouldn't have to do it."

What I learned on my tours over the same territory supported Cornelius's point.
At a packing house in San Antonio, for example, men grunted as they hauled
sides of meat from trucks into refrigerators. They disappeared as I, an Anglo
in a rented car, drove up; Project Jobs had struck here. The beefy, red-haired
foreman said that he'd be "happy" to have citizens in his work force if he
could get them. Of course, he had "no idea" whether there were any illegal
immigrants there. "It's against the law to ask." This is the convenient fiction
that permits many employers to hire an illegal work force and pretend they
haven't.

The agricultural industry in California, Texas, and Florida depends more
heavily on illegal labor than any other industry does, and the growers have a
more fully developed self-justifying rationale. Many protect themselves by
saying they don't know who works for them, since the hiring is done by crew
chiefs, acting as "independent agents." In the Rio Grande Valley of Texas,
"independent" contracting means that people cross the river between 4 and 6
A.M. and stand near the bridges in Brownsville and Progreso, waiting for crew
chiefs to drive up and hire truckloads of workers for the day. In the inland
reaches of Texas and other large agricultural states, commuter labor is not so
feasible, and resident camps of illegal immigrants are an open secret. Growers
say they have no alternative: they need Mexicans (or, in Florida, Haitians) to
work the fields, because no one else would stick with the job. Americans can
get food stamps and live like kings on welfare, I was told by orange growers in
the Rio Grande Valley; but the Mexicans are grateful for the work. They are
even grateful for the piece-rate wages—40 cents for a bushel of cucumbers, 35
cents for a sack of oranges—that usually work out to well under the minimum
wage.

Even Alfred Giugni, whose job is preventing illegal immigration, says the
growers may have a point. Giugni, a gigantic, mirthful man of mixed Italian and
Hawaiian parentage, is the district director of the Immigration and
Naturalization Service office in El Paso. "In the 1950s, the people picking
strawberries in Oregon were high school and college students," he says. "Now
they're Vietnamese and illegal Hispanics. The employers like it, because they
will work harder. Your high school student will work long enough to earn as
much money as he wants, and then he'll quit."

In Houston, a city swollen with immigrants from the declining industrial cities
of Michigan and Indiana and the turbulent societies of Central and South
America, I spent several days talking with illegal immigrants from Mexico and
El Salvador. All had been successful by their own standards, but all operated
along the margin that separates jobs "with a future" from work Americans
"won't" do.

One of the women was in her forties and was wearing a housekeeper's jacket from
an office-maintenance firm. She had been raised in El Salvador, and for several
years taught elementary school there. She came to the United States in 1970,
when she was in her late twenties, on a tourist visa. It expired after three
months, but she decided to stay. She began to work as a live-in maid for three
immigrant families who shared one house. Her pay was $40 a week plus room and
board. By 1974, she was earning $75 a week for the same work.

"Next, I learn to drive, so I can make more money," she said. With more of the
city to choose her employers from, she was able to raise her rate to $125 a
week. "But I am so tired of living in. I look for other work." In 1977, she
found a job as a nighttime janitor—"bathroom lady"—in an office building.
After a month and a half there, "the company sees that I speak a little
English," she said. "They have other Latin people working there. They put me in
a supervisory position, give me $2.65 an hour. During the days, I still clean
house for $30 a day. I take the bus, and from six to ten in the evening I clean
the offices. I am working thirteen hours a day."

She maintained this pace until 1981. As she had moved toward bigger, more
institutionalized employers, her treatment had improved, and she hoped to
continue that trend. She went to the employment manager at one of Houston's
best-known hotels and applied to be supervisor of the housekeeping staff. She
was eventually hired, and after several months moved to a similar position at a
new office center. She now earns and pays taxes on $18,000 a year. "Nobody ever
asks me for my paper," she says. "Never. But my wages are too low I take care
of a big place; I would be making more than $18,000 if I had my papers."

I also met in Houston an eighteen-year-old with a tousle-haired country-boy
look, who was dressed in shiny black polyester trousers and a matching vest,
worn over a white-on-white shirt. He left his farming village in El Salvador
late in 1980, because, he said, "it is dangerous to be on either side." He took
buses through Guatemala and Mexico, offered *mordida*—bribes—of $10 and $20 a
shot to Mexican officials along the way, and reached the frontier near Nuevo
Laredo, Mexico, by the end of the year. He crossed the Rio Grande, which at
most places means nothing more than a wade, and hitchhiked out of Laredo to
Houston. He located friends from his village, lived with them, and found a job
at $3.40 an hour washing dishes in a well-known hotel. This wage was typical:
outside of agriculture and domestic service, I found almost no illegal
immigrants working for less than the federal minimum wage of $3.35 an hour, but
many working at the minimum or just above it.

After a few days in the kitchen, the young man had heard enough from his
friends to believe that he could find a less grueling way to earn his money. He
found a job in a metal-pipe yard, which at least was outdoor work. He tried to
improve his English, and, although it is still not good, he was able to apply
for jobs in which he would deal with the public. He returned to the hotel,
where he now works as a bartender, earning $4.25 an hour.

His companion, also from El Salvador, was a twenty-four-year-old with the
intense, committed look of a radical intellectual. Of the several dozen
Salvadorans I met in California and Texas, perhaps one quarter explained their
immigration in terms of political oppression and human rights. The rest said
they were hunting for work. This young man was one of the quarter. He said he
had reluctantly left his wife and child behind, because he was "Looking for a
country that would respect human rights." He took buses through Mexico until he
neared the U.S. border, then waded the Rio Grande near Brownsville. He worked
on farm-labor gangs on the vast, flat ranches of South Texas, hitched a ride to
Houston, and started as a minimum-wage dishwasher in a hotel, the job he still
holds. After he was established, he called for his wife to join him. She left
their first child at home with her parents. Their second child was born in
Houston late last year, a U. S. citizen.

These dishwashers and maids think they are doing jobs most Americans would
refuse. But there is another view of illegal immigration: it holds that men and
women like those I met in Houston are displacing Americans, directly or
indirectly.

Donald Huddle, of Rice University, contends that citizens do want the jobs
immigrants now hold. Huddle and other researchers surveyed the jobs that
illegal immigrants were holding when they were caught and found that they paid
from $4 to $9.50 an hour. He concluded, "These wages debunk the commonly held
notion that illegal aliens are taking only those jobs that Americans don't want
because they are so lowly paid." Vernon Briggs points out that in every broad
category of work in which illegal immigrants are found, most of the workers are
still American citizens. He says that therefore it is misleading to talk about
"immigrant work."

A more fundamental objection raised to the "Americans won't do dirty work"
argument is that it ignores the dynamic aspect of economics. Perhaps it proves
nothing that citizens won't take the jobs now available in the packing house
and the tomato field; perhaps those jobs are dirty and low-paid precisely
because so much cheap labor is available to fill them. "If there were no
illegals," says Ray Marshall, "the jobs would be different."

Businesses in the service sector, such as restaurants and hotels, would pass
along the modest additional cost of hiring legal help. Who would notice the
extra dollar on the dinner bill? Some farmers would be able to pass along the
extra cost of picking grapes or oranges; others would use labor more
efficiently or mechanize their fields.

Still other businesses would fold, but for them the restrictionists shed no
tears. In part, they would be service "businesses," such as household help.
What would happen if the border were closed tomorrow? I asked Alfred Giugni, in
El Paso. "The only serious impact would be the maid situation," he said.
"Everything else would work out. You get the impression that the only maids who
are paid the minimum wage in El Paso are the ones who work for people in the
INS [Immigration and Naturalization Service]."

The other likely casualties would be garment factories, leather works, and
other low-wage, labor-intensive businesses. "The jobs in which illegal aliens
are not displacing American workers are those jobs in which American industry
is competing with workers in newly developed countries," Dan Stein, an official
of FAIR, has written. America's future lies with a skillful work force and high
tech. "The fewer unskilled laborers there are in this country, the better off
we should be," Vernon Briggs says.

In any case, Conner, Briggs, and others argue, it is a strange and greedy kind
of social arithmetic that tots up those who might hypothetically be hurt by
restriction but ignores those who are now paying the costs of uncontrolled
borders.

Briggs notes government estimates that 29 million people, or nearly 30 percent
of the employed civilian labor force, work in what he calls "the kinds of
low-skilled industrial, service, and agricultural jobs in which illegal aliens
typically seek employment." He contends that "farm workers, dishwashers,
laborers, garbage collectors, building cleaners, restaurant employees,
gardeners, maintenance workers, to name a few occupations, perform useful and
often indispensable work. Unfortunately, their remuneration is often poor, in
part because there is a large pool of persons available for these jobs."

"The victims of immigration are the marginal workers, with low education, who
may not be hot to work sixty hours a week," says Roger Conner. "My own life as
an employer teaches me that if an employer is looking for a minimum of hassle,
he will look past these people—unless he has a reason to have to make it work
with them. There is just enough truth to the notion that aliens make better
workers that it nourishes the stereotypes and creates a self-fulfilling
prophecy. One reason there are so few opportunities for young black people on
construction sites is that the aliens on the scene always have somebody
available to bring in with them."

When Conner was a boy, in Dallas, his mother took in ironing and later did
domestic work. He cites today's counterparts of his younger self as among the
Americans the immigrant hurts. "To the extent that the initial targets of
immigrants tend to be unskilled jobs and low-skill entrepreneurial
opportunities—say a small construction company—those are the ways out of
poverty for the energetic American. The guy who wants to work his way up—to
him the immigrant is an obstacle. I would concede a gain in efficiency from
immigration, but the cost is what we lose in upward mobility from the lower
classes."

Conner's "concession" distills the economic argument against immigration to its
pure form: immigrants can make the economy more efficient, but they can hurt
the American lower class. Is this grounds for closing the door? I believe
not.

For one thing, the analysis may be totally incorrect. Sixty years ago,
Progressives and conservatives joined to oppose the New Immigration. The
Progressives based their argument on the damage done to America's poor. Robert
Hunter's *Poverty*, an influential Progressive tract, concluded that the
immigrant stood between the American workingman and a better life. The
Dillingham Commission, a government panel whose forty-two-volume study laid the
groundwork for the immigration laws of the 1920s, also said that immigrants
displaced American workers. Even so, the commission concluded that displaced
workers found better jobs in an expanding economy. Oscar Handlin has said of
its findings, "To the extent that immigrants contributed to that expansion,
they actually helped to lift the condition of the laborers they found already
there."

Is it necessarily any different now? In Texas and California, Mexican-Americans
have been displaced by Mexican immigrants. Ricardo Romo, who teaches history at
the University of Texas, says that his parents were displaced from their
migrant laborers' jobs in South Texas. But "no one should assume that those who
leave are worse off than if they had stayed," he says. "In many cases, there is
substantial improvement when people move on. The kids go to better schools than
their parents, they get into skilled trades."

Through the past decade, unemployment has been low in the very places where
immigration, legal and illegal, has been the greatest: California, Florida,
Texas. True, this is partly tautology—why would immigrants go where there were
no jobs? But it also suggests that a growing economy, even though washed by
waves of immigration, can create more opportunities for Americans than a
stagnant one that freezes competitors out.

The Urban Institute's study of Southern California reported that the region's
unemployment rates for all races and age groups were lower than the national
average, and that the difference between rates for whites and for non-whites
was less than elsewhere. This was true though Southern California is rivaled
only by Miami in its concentration of immigrants and has a higher proportion of
illegals. "One can conclude that the large undocumented population in Los
Angeles did not increase unemployment among Hispanics or other groups in Los
Angeles," the report said.

Even if the case against illegal immigrants is assumed to be true, is the
solution to shield the entire economy from the bracing effects of immigration?
Restrictionists often cite the case of Kemah, Texas, to suggest the tensions
that even legal immigrants create. In Kemah, the commercial fishermen who had
long worked the Gulf Coast found their waters dotted with Vietnamese in rival
boats. The Vietnamese were here legally, admitted as refugees. They had
scrimped, like the Nguyens, to lease or buy their fishing craft. The
working-class whites of the region had initially tolerated them. When the
Vietnamese "took low income jobs cleaning fish or working in restaurant
kitchens, they were acceptable," Paul D. Starr, a sociologist from Auburn
University, said recently in the Texas Observer. "But when they became
fishermen—and competitors—attitudes toward them changed....The unpleasant
fact is that the Vietnamese work harder and longer and under more difficult
conditions than do most Americans."

The Vietnamese won, and American citizens lost—but they lost in the kind of
economic competition that is supposed to be the engine of capitalism. Should
the fishermen have been protected against the Vietnamese's willingness to work
longer hours? Are we ready to say that fair competition is too much for
Americans to withstand? Unless we are, there is no economic case against legal
immigration.

Unfair competition is something else. Illegal immigrants, however admirable as
individuals, are unfair rivals. They are often exploited, but that is not the
real inequity. After all, they are here by their own choice. They are most
unfair to the struggling Americans who hold similar jobs. Appreciating the
immigrants' adaptability, we should welcome their lawful presence. Can anyone
contend that what the Nguyen family enjoys it has "taken" from someone else?
But recognizing the barriers that the black teenager, the white laborer, and
the Mexican-American father confront, and the strains their frustration puts on
the entire society, we should attempt to ensure that less of America's
immigration takes place outside the law.

Assume for a moment that legal immigrants make an economy more efficient. Does
that tell us all we need to know in order to understand their impact on our
society? A national culture is held together by official rules and informal
signals. Through their language, dress, taste, and habits of life, immigrants
initially violate the rules and confuse the signals. The United States has
prided itself on building a nation out of diverse parts. *E Pluribus Unum*
originally referred to the act of political union in which separate colonies
became one sovereign state. It now seems more fitting as a token of the
cultural adjustments through which immigrant strangers have become Americans.
Can the assimilative forces still prevail?

The question arises because most of today's immigrants share one trait: their
native language is Spanish.

From 1970 to 1978, the three leading sources of legal immigrants to the U.S.
were Mexico, the Philippines, and Cuba. About 42 percent of legal immigration
during the seventies was from Latin America. It is thought that about half of
all illegal immigrants come from Mexico, and 10 to 15 percent more from
elsewhere in Latin America. Including illegal immigrants makes all figures
imprecise, but it seems reasonable to conclude that more than half the people
who now come to the United States speak Spanish. This is a greater
concentration of immigrants in one non-English language group than ever
before.

Is it a threat? The conventional wisdom about immigrants and their languages is
that the Spanish-speakers are asking for treatment different from that which
has been accorded to everybody else. In the old days, it is said, immigrants
were eager to assimilate as quickly as possible. They were placed, sink or
swim, in English-language classrooms, and they swam. But now the Latin
Americans seem to be insisting on bilingual classrooms and ballots. "The
Hispanics demand that the United States become a bilingual country, with all
children entitled to be taught in the language of their heritage, at public
expense," Theodore White has written. Down this road lie the linguistic
cleavages that have brought grief to other nations.

This is the way many people think, and this is the way I myself thought as I
began this project.

The historical parallel closest to today's concentration of Spanish-speaking
immigrants is the German immigration of the nineteenth century. From 1830 to
1890, 4.5 million Germans emigrated to the United States, making up one third
of the immigrant total. The Germans recognized that command of English would
finally ensure for them, and especially for their children, a place in the
mainstream of American society. But like the Swedes, Dutch, and French before
them, they tried hard to retain the language in which they had been raised.

The midwestern states, where Germans were concentrated, established bilingual
schools, in which children could receive instruction in German. In Ohio.
German-English public schools were in operation by 1840; in 1837, the
Pennsylvania legislature ordered that German-language public schools be
established on an equal basis with English-language schools. Minnesota,
Maryland, and Indiana also operated public schools in which German was used,
either by itself or in addition to English. In *Life with Two Languages,* his
study of bilingualism, Francois Grosjean says, "What is particularly striking
about German Americans in the nineteenth century is their constant efforts to
maintain their language, culture, and heritage. "

Yet despite everything the Germans could do, their language began to die out.
The progression was slow and fraught with pain. For the immigrant, language was
the main source of certainty and connection to the past. As the children broke
from the Old World culture and tried out their snappy English slang on their
parents, the pride the parents felt at such achievements was no doubt mixed
with the bittersweet awareness that they were losing control.

At first the children would act as interpreters for their parents; then they
would demand the independence appropriate to that role; then they would yearn
to escape the coarse ways of immigrant life. And in the end, they would be
Americans. It was hard on the families, but it built an assimilated
English-language culture.

The pattern of assimilation is familiar from countless novels, as well as from
the experience of many people now living. Why, then, is the currently
fashionable history of assimilation so different? Why is it assumed, in so many
discussions of bilingual education, that in the old days immigrants switched
quickly and enthusiastically to English?

One reason is that the experience of Jewish immigrants in the early twentieth
century was different from this pattern. German Jews, successful and thoroughly
assimilated here in the nineteenth century, oversaw an effort to bring Eastern
European Jews into the American mainstream as quickly as possible. In New York
City, the Lower East Side's Hebrew Institute, later known as the Educational
Alliance, defined its goal as teaching the newcomers "the privileges and duties
of American citizenship." Although many Jewish immigrants preserved their
Yiddish, Jews generally learned English faster than any other group.

Another reason that nineteenth-century linguistic history is so little
remembered lies in the political experience of the early twentieth century. As
an endless stream of New Immigrants arrived from Eastern Europe, the United
States was awash in theories about the threats the newcomers posed to American
economic, sanitary, and racial standards, and the "100 percent Americanism"
movement arose. By the late 1880s, school districts in the Midwest had already
begun reversing their early encouragement of bilingual education. Competence in
English was made a requirement for naturalized citizens in 1906.
Pro-English-language leagues sprang up to help initiate the New Immigrants.
California's Commission on Immigration and Housing, for example, endorsed a
campaign of "Americanization propaganda " in light of "the necessity for all to
learn English—the language of America." With the coming of World War I, all
German-language activities were suddenly cast in a different light. Eventually
as a result, Americans came to believe that previous immigrants had speedily
switched to English, and to view the Hispanics' attachment to Spanish as a
troubling aberration.

The term "Hispanic" is in many ways deceiving. It refers to those whose origins
can be traced back to Spain (Hispania) or Spain's former colonies. It makes a
bloc out of Spanish-speaking peoples who otherwise have little in common. The
Cuban-Americans, concentrated in Florida, are flush with success. Some of them
nurse dreams of political revenge against Castro. They demonstrate little
solidarity with such other Hispanics as the Mexican-Americans of Texas, who are
much less estranged from their homeland and who have been longtime participants
in the culture of the Southwest. The Cuban-Americans tend to be Republicans;
most Mexican-Americans and Puerto Ricans are Democrats. The Puerto Ricans, who
are U.S. citizens from birth, and who have several generations of contact with
American city life behind them, bear little resemblance to the Salvadorans and
Guatemalans now pouring northward to get out of the way of war. Economically,
the Puerto Ricans of New York City have more in common with American blacks
than with most other Hispanic groups. Such contact as Anglo and black residents
of Boston and New York have with Hispanic life comes mainly through Puerto
Ricans; they may be misled about what to expect from the Mexicans and Central
Americans arriving in ever increasing numbers. Along the southern border,
Mexican-American children will razz youngsters just in from Mexico. A newcomer
is called a "T.J," for Tijuana; it is the equivalent of "hillbilly" or
"rube."

Still, "Hispanic" can be a useful word, because it focuses attention on the
major question about this group of immigrants: Will their assimilation into an
English-speaking culture be any less successful than that of others in the
past?

To answer, we must consider what is different now from the circumstances under
which the Germans, Poles, and Italians learned English.

The most important difference is that the host country is right next door. The
only other non-English-speaking group for which this is true is the
French-Canadians. Proximity has predictable consequences. For as long as the
Southwest has been part of the United States, there has been a border culture
in which, for social and commercial reasons, both languages have been used.
There has also been a Mexican-American population accustomed to moving freely
across the border, between the cultures, directing its loyalties both ways.

Because it has always been so easy to go home, many Mexicans and
Mexican-Americans have displayed the classic sojourner outlook. The more total
the break with the mother country, the more pressure immigrants feel to adapt;
but for many immigrants from Mexico, whose kin and friends still live across
the border and whose dreams center on returning in wealthy splendor to their
native villages, the pressure is weak.

Many people have suggested that there is another difference, perhaps more
significant than the first. It is a change in the nation's self-confidence. The
most familiar critique of bilingual education holds that the nation no longer
feels a resolute will to require mastery of the national language. America's
most powerful assimilative force, the English language, may therefore be in
jeopardy.

It is true that starting in the early 1960s U.S. government policy began to
move away from the quick-assimilation approach preferred since the turn of the
century. After surveys of Puerto Rican students in New York City and
Mexican-Americans in Texas revealed that they were dropping out of school early
and generally having a hard time, educational theorists began pushing plans for
Spanish-language instruction. The turning point came with *Lau v. Nichols,* a
case initiated in 1971 by Chinese-speaking students in San Francisco. They sued
for "equal protection," on grounds that their unfamiliarity with English denied
them an adequate education. In 1974, the Supreme Court ruled in their favor,
saying that "those who do not understand English are certain to find their
classroom experience wholly incomprehensible and in no way meaningful." The
ruling did not say that school systems had to start bilingual programs of the
kind that the phrase is now generally understood to mean—that is, classrooms
in which both languages are used. The court said that "teaching English to the
students...who do not speak the language" would be one acceptable solution. But
the federal regulations and state laws that implemented the decision obliged
many districts to set up the system of "transitional" bilingual education that
has since become the focus of furor.

The rules vary from state to state, but they typically require a school
district to set up a bilingual program whenever a certain number of students
(often twenty) at one grade level are from one language group and do not speak
English well. In principle, bilingual programs will enable them to keep up with
the content of, say, their math and history courses while preparing them to
enter the English-language classroom.

The bilingual system is accused of supporting a cadre of educational
consultants while actually retarding the students' progress into the
English-speaking mainstream. In this view, bilingual education could even be
laying the foundation for a separate Hispanic culture, by extending the
students' Spanish-language world from their homes to their schools.

Before I traveled to some of the schools in which bilingual education was
applied, I shared the skeptics' view. What good could come of a system that
encouraged, to whatever degree, a language other than the national tongue? But
after visiting elementary, junior high, and high schools in Miami, Houston, San
Antonio, Austin, several parts of Los Angeles, and San Diego, I found little
connection between the political debate over bilingual education and what was
going on in these schools.

To begin with, one central fact about bilingual education goes largely
unreported. It is a temporary program. The time a typical student stays in the
program varies from place to place—often two years in Miami, three years in
Los Angeles—but when that time has passed, the student will normally leave.
Why, then, do bilingual programs run through high school? Those classes are
usually for students who are new to the district—usually because their parents
are new to the country.

There is another fact about bilingual education, more difficult to prove but
impressive to me, a hostile observer. Most of the children I saw were
unmistakably learning to speak English.

In the elementary schools, where the children have come straight out of
all-Spanish environments, the background babble seems to be entirely in
Spanish. The kindergarten and first- to third-grade classrooms I saw were
festooned with the usual squares and circles cut from colored construction
paper, plus posters featuring Big Bird and charts about the weather and the
seasons. Most of the schools seemed to keep a rough balance between English and
Spanish in the lettering around the room; the most Spanish environment I saw
was in one school in East Los Angeles, where about a third of the signs were in
English.

The elementary school teachers were mostly Mexican-American women. They
prompted the children with a mixture of English and Spanish during the day.
While books in both languages are available in the classrooms, most of the
first-grade reading drills I saw were in Spanish. In theory, children will
learn the phonetic principle of reading more quickly if they are not trying to
learn a new language at the same time. Once comfortable as readers, they will
theoretically be able to transfer their ability to English.

In a junior high school in Houston, I saw a number of Mexican and Salvadoran
students in their "bilingual" biology and math classes. They were drilled
entirely in Spanish on the parts of an amoeba and on the difference between a
parallelogram and a rhombus. When students enter bilingual programs at this
level, the goal is to keep them current with the standard curriculum while
introducing them to English. I found my fears of linguistic separatism
rekindled by the sight of fourteen-year-olds lectured to in Spanish. I reminded
myself that many of the students I was seeing had six months earlier lived in
another country.

The usual next stop for students whose time in bilingual education is up is a
class in intensive English, lasting one to three hours a day. These students
are divided into two or three proficiency levels, from those who speak no
English to those nearly ready to forgo special help. In Houston, a teacher
drilled two-dozen high-school-age Cambodians, Indians, Cubans, and Mexicans on
the crucial difference between the voiced *th* sound of "this" and the
voiceless *th* of "thing." In Miami, a class of high school sophomores included
youths from Cuba, El Salvador, and Honduras. They listened as their teacher
read a Rockwellesque essay about a student with a crush on his teacher, and
then set to work writing an essay of their own, working in words like
"Garrulous" and "sentimentalize."

One of the students in Miami, a sixteen-year-old from Honduras, said that his
twelve-year-old brother had already moved into mainstream classes. Linguists
say this is the standard pattern for immigrant children. The oldest children
hold on to their first language longest, while their younger sisters and
brothers swim quickly into the new language culture.

The more I saw of the classes, the more convinced I became that most of the
students were learning English. Therefore, I started to wonder what it is about
bilingual education that has made it the focus of such bitter disagreement.

For one thing, most immigrant groups other than Hispanics take a comparatively
dim view of bilingual education. Haitians, Vietnamese, and Cambodians are
eligible for bilingual education, but in general they are unenthusiastic. In
Miami, Haitian boys and girls may learn to read in Creole rather than English.
Still, their parents push to keep them moving into English. "A large number of
[Haitian] parents come to the PTA meetings, and they don't want interpreters,"
said the principal of Miami's Edison Park Elementary School last spring. They
want to learn English. They don't want notices coming home in three languages.
When they come here, unless there is total non-communication, they will try to
get through to us in their broken English. The students learn the language very
quickly."

Bilingual education is inflammatory in large part because of what it
symbolizes, not because of the nuts and bolts of its daily operation. In
reality, bilingual programs move students into English with greater or lesser
success; in reality, most Spanish-speaking parents understand that mastery of
English will be their children's key to mobility. But in the political arena,
bilingual education presents a different face. To the Hispanic ideologue, it is
a symbol of cultural pride and political power. And once it has been presented
that way, with full rhetorical flourish, it naturally strikes other Americans
as a threat to the operating rules that have bound the country together.

Once during the months I spoke with and about immigrants I felt utterly
exasperated. It was while listening to two Chicano activist lawyers in Houston
who demanded to know why their people should be required to learn English at
all. "It is unrealistic to think people can learn it that quickly," one lawyer
said about the law that requires naturalized citizens to pass a test in
English. Especially when they used to own this part of the country, and when
Spanish was the historic language of this region."

There is a historic claim for Spanish—but by the same logic there is a
stronger claim for, say, Navajo as the historic language of the Southwest. The
truth is that for more than a century the territory has been American and its
national language has been English.

I felt the same irritation welling up when I talked with many bilingual
instructors and policy-makers. Their arguments boiled down to: What's so
special about English? They talked about the richness of the bilingual
experience, the importance of maintaining the children's abilities in
Spanish—even though when I watched the instructors in the classroom I could
see that they were teaching principally English.

In my exasperation, I started to think that if such symbols of the dignity of
language were so provocative to me, a comfortable member of the least-aggrieved
ethnic group, it might be worth reflecting on the comparable sensitivities that
lie behind the sentiments of the Spanish-speaking.

Consider the cases of Gloria Ramirez and Armandina Flores, who taught last year
in the bilingual program at the Guerra Elementary School, in the Edgewood
Independent School District, west of San Antonio.

San Antonio has evaded questions about the balance between rich and poor in its
school system by carving the city up into independent school districts. Alamo
Heights is the winner under this approach, and Edgewood is the loser. The
Edgewood School District is perennially ranked as one of the poorest in the
state. The residents are almost all Mexican-Americans or Mexicans. It is a
settled community, without much to attract immigrants, but many stop there
briefly on their way somewhere else, enough to give Edgewood a sizable
illegal-immigrant enrollment.

In the middle of a bleak, sun-baked stretch of fields abutting a commercial
vegetable farm, and within earshot of Kelly Air Force Base, sits Edgewood's
Guerra School. It is an ordinary-looking but well-kept one-story structure that
was built during the Johnson Administration. Nearly all the students are
Mexican or Mexican-American.

Gloria Ramirez, who teaches first grade, is a compact, attractive woman of
thirty-three, a no-nonsense veteran of the activist movements of the 1960s.
Armandina Flores, a twenty-seven-year-old kindergarten teacher, is a beauty
with dark eyes and long hair. During classroom hours, they deliver "Now,
children" explanations of what is about to happen in both Spanish and English,
although when the message really must get across, it comes in Spanish.

Both are remarkable teachers. They have that spark often thought to be missing
in the public schools. There is no hint that for them this is just a job,
perhaps because it symbolizes something very different from the worlds in which
they were raised.

Gloria Ramirez was born in Austin, in 1950. Both of her parents are native
Texans, as were two of her grandparents, but her family, like many other
Mexican-American families, "spoke only Spanish when I was growing up," she
says. None of her grandparents went to school at all. Her parents did not go
past the third grade. Her father works as an auto-body mechanic; her mother
raised the six children, and recently went to work at Austin State Hospital as
a cleaner.

Ramirez began learning English when she started school; but the school, on
Austin's east side, was overwhelmingly Mexican-American, part of the same
culture she'd always known. The big change came when she was eleven. Her family
moved to a working-class Anglo area in South Austin. She and her brother were
virtually the only Mexican-Americans at the school. There was no more Spanish
on the playground, or even at home. "My parents requested that we speak more
English to them from then on," she says. "Both of them could speak it, but
neither was comfortable."

"Before then, I didn't realize I had an accent. I didn't know until a teacher
at the new school pointed it out in a ridiculing manner. I began learning
English out of revenge." For six years, she took speech classes. "I worked hard
so I could sound—like this," she says in standard American. She went to the
University of Texas, where she studied history and philosophy and became
involved in the Mexican-American political movements of the 1970s. She taught
bilingual-education classes in Boston briefly before coming home to Texas.

Armandina Flores was born in Ciudad Acuna, Mexico, across the river from Del
Rio, Texas. Her mother, who was born in Houston, was an American citizen, but
her parents had returned to Mexico a few months after her birth, and she had
never learned English. Flores's father was a Mexican citizen. When she reached
school age, she began commuting across the river to a small Catholic school in
Del Rio, where all the other students were Chicano. When she was twelve and
about to begin the sixth grade, her family moved to Del Rio and she entered an
American public school.

At that time, the sixth grade was divided into tracks, which ran from 6-1 at
the bottom to 6-12. Most of the Anglos were at the top; Armandina Flores was
initially placed in 6-4. She showed an aptitude for English and was moved up to
6-8. Meanwhile, her older sister, already held back once, was in 6-2. Her
parents were proud of Armandina's progress; they began to depend on her English
in the family's dealings in the Anglo world. She finished high school in Del
Rio, went to Our Lady of the Lake College in San Antonio, and came to Edgewood
as an aide in 1978, when she was twenty-two.

Considered one way, these two stories might seem to confirm every charge made
by the opponents of bilingual education. Through the trauma of being plucked
from her parents' comfortable Spanish-language culture and plunged into the
realm of public language, Gloria Ramirez was strengthened, made a cosmopolitan
and accomplished person. Her passage recalls the one Richard Rodriguez
describes in *Hunger of Memory,* an autobiography that has become the most
eloquent text for opponents of bilingual programs.

"Without question, it would have pleased me to hear my teachers address me in
Spanish when I entered the classroom," Rodriguez wrote. "I would have felt much
less afraid....But I would have delayed—for how long postponed?—having to
learn the language of public society."

Gloria Ramirez concedes that the pain of confused ethnicity and lost loyalties
among Mexican-Americans is probably very similar to what every other immigrant
group has endured. She even admits that she was drawn to bilingual education
for political as well as educational reasons. As for Armandina Flores, hers is
a calmer story of successful assimilation, accomplished without the crutch of
bilingual education.

Yet both of these women insist, with an edge to their voices, that their
students are fortunate not to have the same passage awaiting them.

It was a very wasteful process, they say. They swam; many others sank. "You
hear about the people who make it, but not about all the others who dropped
out, who never really learned," Ramirez says. According to the Mexican-American
Legal Defense and Education Fund, 40 percent of Hispanic students drop out
before they finish high school, three times as many as among Anglo students.

"Many people around here don't feel comfortable with themselves in either
language," Ramirez says. Flores's older sister never became confident in
English; "she feels like a lower person for it." She has just had a baby and is
anxious that he succeed in English. Ramirez's older brother learned most of his
English in the Marines. He is married to a Mexican immigrant and thinks that it
is very important that their children learn English. And that is more likely to
happen, the teachers say, if they have a transitional moment in Spanish.

Otherwise, "a child must make choices that concern his survival," Ramirez says,
"He can choose to learn certain words, only to survive; but it can kill his
desire to learn, period. Eventually he may be able to deal in the language, but
he won't be educated." If the natural-immersion approach worked, why, they ask,
would generation after generation of Chicanos, American citizens living
throughout the Southwest, have lived and died without ever fully moving into
the English-language mainstream?

These two teachers, and a dozen others with parallel experience, might be wrong
in their interpretation of how bilingual education works. If so, they are
making the same error as German, Polish, and Italian immigrants. According to
the historians hired by the Select Commission, "Immigrants argued, when given
the opportunity, that the security provided them by their cultures eased rather
than hindered the transition." Still, there is room for reasonable disagreement
about the most effective techniques for bringing children into English. A
former teacher named Robert Rossier, for example, argues from his experience
teaching immigrants that intensive courses in English are more effective than a
bilingual transition. Others line up on the other side.

But is this not a question for factual resolution rather than for battles about
linguistic and ethnic pride? Perhaps one approach will succeed for certain
students in certain situations and the other will be best for others. The
choice between bilingual programs and intensive-English courses, then, should
be a choice between methods, not ideologies. The wars over bilingual education
have had a bitter, symbolic quality. Each side has invested the issue with a
meaning the other can barely comprehend. To most Mexican-American parents and
children, bilingual education is merely a way of learning English; to Hispanic
activists, it is a symbol that they are at last taking their place in the sun.
But to many other Americans, it sounds like a threat not to assimilate.

It is easy for Americans to take for granted, or fail to appreciate, the
strength of American culture," says Henry Cisneros, the mayor of San Antonio.
Cisneros is the first Mexican-American mayor of the country's most heavily
Hispanic major city, a tall, grave man of thirty-six who is as clear a
demonstration of the possibilities of ethnic assimilation as John Kennedy was.
Cisneros gives speeches in Spanish and in English. Over the door that leads to
his chambers, gilt letters spell out "Office of the Mayor" and, underneath,
"Oficina den Alcalde." "I'm talking about TV programs, McDonald's, automobiles,
the Dallas Cowboys. It is very pervasive. Mexican-Americans like the American
way of life."

"These may sound like just the accouterments," Cisneros says. "I could also
have mentioned due process of law; relations with the police; the way
supermarkets work; the sense of participation, especially now that more and
more Mexican-Americans are in positions of leadership. All of the things that
shape the American way of life are indomitable."

In matters of civic culture, many Mexican-Americans, especially in Texas, act
as custodians of the values the nation is said to esteem. They emphasize
family, church, and patriotism of the most literal sort, expressed through
military service. In the shrine-like position of honor in the sitting room. the
same place where black families may have portraits of John F. Kennedy or Martin
Luther King, a Mexican-American household in Texas will display a picture of
the son or nephew in the Marines. Every time I talked with a Mexican-American
about assimilation and separatism I heard about the Mexican-American heroes and
martyrs who have served in the nation's wars.

All the evidence suggests that Hispanics are moving down the path toward
assimilation. According to a survey conducted in 1982 by Rodolfo de la Garza
and Robert Brischetto for the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project,
11 percent of Chicanos (including a large number of illegal immigrants) were
unable to speak English. The younger the people, the more likely they were to
speak English. Ninety-four percent of those between the ages of eighteen and
twenty-five could speak English, versus 78 percent of those aged sixty-six to
eighty-seven. Not surprisingly the English-speakers were better educated, had
better jobs. and were less likely to have two foreign-born parents than the
Spanish-speakers.

The details of daily life in Hispanic centers confirm these findings. The first
impression of East Los Angeles or Little Havana is of ubiquitous Spanish, on
the billboards and in the air. The second glance reveals former Chicano
activists, now in their late thirties, bemused that their children have not
really learned Spanish, or second-generation Cubans who have lost interest in
liberating the motherland or in being Cubans at all.

Ricardo Romo says that when he taught Chicano studies at UCLA, his graduate
students would go into the San Antonio *barrio* but could not find their way
around, so much had they lost touch with the Spanish language. At a birthday
party for a Chicano intellectual in Texas, amid *pinatas* and plates laden with
*fajitas,* a birthday cake from a bakery was unveiled. It said "Happy Birthday"
in Spanish—misspelled. There was pathos in that moment, but it was pathos that
countless Italians, Poles, and Jews might understand.

With Mexico next door to the United States, the Mexican-American culture will
always be different from that of other ethnic groups. Spanish will be a living
language in the United States longer than any other alternative to English. But
the movement toward English is inescapable.

In only one respect does the Hispanic impulse seem to me to lead in a dangerous
direction. Hispanics are more acutely aware than most Anglos that, as a
practical reality, English is the national language of commerce, government,
and mobility. But some have suggested that, in principle, it should not be this
way.

They invoke the long heritage of Mexican-Americans in the Southwest. As
"Californios" or "Tejanos," the ancestors of some of these families lived on
and owned the territory before the Anglo settlers. Others came across at the
turn of the century, at a time of Mexican upheaval; still others came during
the forties and fifties, as workers. They have paid taxes, fought in wars, been
an inseparable part of the region's culture. Yet they were also subject to a
form of discrimination more casual than the segregation of the Old South, but
having one of the same effects. Because of poverty or prejudice or
gerrymandered school districts, many Mexican-Americans were, in effect, denied
education. One result is that many now in their fifties and sixties do not
speak English well. Still, they are citizens, with the right of citizens to
vote. How are they to exercise their right if to do so requires learning
English? Do they not deserve a ballot printed in a language they can
understand?

In the early seventies, the issue came before the courts, and several decisions
held that if voters otherwise eligible could not understand English, they must
have voting materials prepared in a more convenient language. In 1976, the
Voting Rights Act amendments said that there must be bilingual ballots if more
than 5 percent of the voters in a district were members of a "language minority
group." The only language minority groups" eligible under this ruling were
American Indians, Alaskan natives, Asian-Americans (most significantly, Chinese
and Filipinos), and Spanish-speakers. A related case extracted from the Sixth
Circuit Court of Appeals the judgment that "the national language of the United
States is English."

So it is that ballots in parts of the country are printed in Spanish, or
Chinese, or Tagalog, along with English. This is true even though anyone
applying for naturalization must still pass an English-proficiency test, which
consists of questions such as "What are the three branches of government?" and
"How long are the terms of a U.S. Senator and member of Congress?" The apparent
inconsistency reflects the linguistic reality that many native-born citizens
have not learned the national language.

By most accounts, the bilingual ballot is purely a symbol. The native-born
citizens who can't read English often can't read Spanish, either. As a symbol,
it points in the wrong direction, away from a single national language in which
the public business will be done. Its only justification is the older
generation, which was excluded from the schools. In principle, then, it should
be phased out in several years.

But there are those who feel that even the present arrangement is too onerous.
Rose Matsui Ochi, an assistant to the mayor of Los Angeles, who served on the
Select Commission, dissented from the commission's recommendation to keep the
English-language requirement for citizenship. She wrote in her minority
opinion, "Abolishing the requirement recognizes the inability of certain
individuals to learn English." Cruz Reynoso, the first Mexican-American
appointee to the California Supreme Court, was also on the Select Commission,
and he too dissented. America is a political union—not a cultural, linguistic,
religious or racial union," he wrote. "Of course, we as individuals would urge
all to learn English, for that is the language used by most Americans, as well
as the language of the marketplace. But we should no more demand
English-language skills for citizenship than we should demand uniformity of
religion. That a person wants to become a citizen and will make a good citizen
is more than enough."

Some Chicano activists make the same point in less temperate terms. Twice I
found myself in shouting matches with Mexican-Americans who asked me who I
thought I was to tell them—after all the homeboys who had died in combat,
after all the insults they'd endured on the playground for speaking
Spanish—what language they "should" speak.

That these arguments were conducted in English suggests the theoretical nature
of the debate. Still, in questions like this, symbolism can be crucial. "I have
sympathy for the position that the integrating mechanism of a society is
language," Henry Cisneros says. "The U.S. has been able to impose fewer such
integrating mechanisms on its people than other countries, but it needs some
tie to hold these diverse people, Irish, Jews, Czechs, together as a nation.
Therefore, I favor people learning English and being able to conduct business
in the official language of the country."

"The *unum* demands only certain things of the *pluribus,*" Lawrence Fuchs
says. "It demands very little. It demands that we believe in the political
ideals of the republic, which allows people to preserve their ethnic identity.
Most immigrants come from repressive regimes: we say, we're asking you to
believe that government should not oppress you. Then it only asks one other
thing: that in the wider marketplace and in the civic culture, you use the
official language. No other society asks so little.

"English is not just an instrument of mobility. It is a sign that you really
are committed. If you've been here five years, which you must to be a citizen,
and if you are reasonably young, you should be able to learn English in that
time. The rest of us are entitled to that."

Most of the young people I met—the rank and file, not the intellectuals who
espouse a bilingual society— seemed fully willing to give what in Fuchs's view
the nation asks. I remember in particular one husky Puerto Rican athlete at
Miami Senior High School who planned to join the Navy after he got his diploma.
I talked to him in a bilingual classroom, heard his story, and asked his name.
He told me, and I wrote "Ramon." He came around behind me and looked at my pad.
"No, no!" he told me. "You should have put R-A-Y-M-O-N-D. "

In much of the world, political boundaries reflect ethnic divisions that have
endured for thousands of years. Something more than loyalty to a political
system is involved in being a German, a Thai, or a Japanese. Japan, in fact,
refused to accept more than a few thousand Indochinese refugees, primarily on
the grounds that so alien an element could never be absorbed. But the United
States has enshrined the idea that ethnic origins may be surmounted or, better
still, ignored. Once Englishmen, Africans, Turks, we are all Americans now.

The glory of American society is its melding of many peoples. But that has
never been an easy process. Few threads run more consistently through American
social history than concern about racial and ethnic change. Since colonial
days, members of successive ethnic groups have warned that the American
national character, embodied by their group, was endangered by incoming aliens.
The roster of groups that represent the "American" character has slowly
expanded: the original British and Dutch Protestants have been joined by
Catholics and Jews, Central and Eastern Europeans, and, most slowly and
arduously of all, people of color.

Although ethnic concerns obviously remain on Americans' minds, our public
language lacks polite ways to express them. The U.S. must rely on political and
linguistic terms when it attempts to discuss the complicated web of relations
that constitute a society; it has no acceptable language with which to express
concern about changes in the ethnic makeup. Mexicans may complain that gringo
tourists have changed the character of Mexican resorts, and Saudi Arabians may
worry about the effects of American expatriates on their culture. Everyone
concedes that there is a Mexican or a Saudi character, and that Americans do
not have it. But when Americans attempt to talk about the effect of Mexican
immigrants on American society, the only terms that seem to be available are
those of racism. The exhortation inscribed on the Statue of Liberty contains no
notion of degree, no hint that immigration could change American society too
much or too fast.

The United States has faced this issue once before. Its response to the New
Immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe at the turn of the century was
very different from the anti-immigrant feelings of the previous fifty years.
Nativist groups had complained about the Germans and especially the Irish
during the mid-nineteenth century, but there were few suggestions that they
were racially defective. The hostility to Italians, Slavs, and Eastern European
Jews, in contrast, was explicitly racial.

The Dillingham Commission, the official government body whose research paved
the way for the national-origins quota system, published a "Dictionary of
Races" as part of the scientific findings it released in 1910. The purpose of
the dictionary, its authors said, was to ascertain "whether there may not be
certain races that are inferior to other races...to discover some test to show
whether some may be better fitted for American citizenship than others." The
experts who oversaw the dictionary's preparation, according to Oscar Handlin's
*Race and Nationality in American Life,* "agreed that there were innate,
ineradicable race distinctions that separated groups of men from one another,
and they agreed also as to the general necessity of classifying these races to
know which were fittest, most worthy of survival."

By "race," these nativist intellectuals meant what would now be called
ethnicity. In 1916, a New York socialite and scientist named Madison Grant
published a book called *The Passing of the Great Race.* Grant's insight was
that the European population might be divided into three distinct races. The
Nordic race, the source of America's original British and German immigrants,
was, "all over the world, a race of soldiers, sailors, adventurers, and
explorers, but above all, of rulers, organizers and aristocrats...." The other
two European races, the Alpine and the Mediterranean, were heavily represented
in the New Immigration and were deficient in various ways. In the same spirit,
Francis A. Walker, then president of MIT, said that the New Immigrants were
"beaten men from beaten races; representing the worst failures in the struggle
for existence...They have none of the ideas and aptitudes which...belong to
those who are descended from the tribes that met under the oak trees of old
Germany to make laws and choose chieftains."

Most of the quack-scientific theories used to prove the racial inferiority of
the New Immigrants make for easy sport these days. Almost no one is contending
that today's new immigrants are drawn from defective stock. If anything, the
complaint from those who must compete against them is that they are too well
equipped in the struggle for economic survival. The only group to earn
widespread opprobrium was the several thousand Cubans who were released from
prisons and mental hospitals in 1980 and sent to Miami as a small but very
noticeable part of the Mariel boatlift.

While the central thesis of "racial" inferiority has no clear counterpart in
today's immigration debates, the sense of unease about racial and ethnic
differences does. The concerns Americans expressed about the New Immigration
help clarify our responses to the immigration now under way.

The turn-of-the-century restrictionists agreed on a premise that seemed so
obvious to them that it was often left unstated. The premise was that different
races had certain ineradicable traits. Observe the Italian peasant in Calabria,
the Jewish peddler in Minsk, and you have seen the future of these "races" in
America, the argument went. The presumed effects on American culture ranged
from a greater dependence on central government to a reduction in the average
American's height.

As post-melting-pot sociologists remind us, American ethnic groups are
different from one another. They have different religious preferences,
different eating and drinking habits, different patterns of economic success.
Ethnic identification affects our political behavior: American foreign policy,
for example, would be different if it were simply "American," and not an
amalgamation of Irish-American, Greek-American, Polish-American,
Jewish-American, Cuban-American, Afro-American, Italian-American, etc.,
views.

Some people therefore wonder about the directions in which today's new groups
will push tomorrow's American culture. For example, Griffin Smith, an attorney
who is writing a book about immigration, points out that the English word
"representative" and the Spanish word "delegado" appear side by side on the
Texas ballot. "The English word exists in a matrix of history and tradition
that the Spanish counterpart does not altogether share....Whatever else Spain
gave to the New World, a sound political tradition was not high on the list.
Immigration from Latin America brings with it that tradition and culture."

A theme in the early literature of restriction as strong as that of the
ineradicability of ethnic traits was the idea that Americans' land was no
longer their own, that foreign-looking people speaking foreign tongues had
usurped territory that once was comfortable and familiar. In his influential
book *Poverty,* published in 1904, the Progressive reformer Robert Hunter
wrote,

"To live in one of these foreign communities [within American cities] is
actually to live on foreign soil. The thoughts, feelings, and traditions...are
often entirely alien to an American. The newspapers, the literature, the
ideals, the passions, the things which agitate the community, are unknown to us
except in fragments. During the meat riots on the east side of New York City
two years ago, I could understand nothing....A few years ago, when living in
Chicago in a colony of Bohemians and Hungarians who had been thrown out of
employment by the closing of a great industry...I felt the unrest, the
denunciation, the growing brutality but I was unable to discuss with them their
grievances, to sympathize with them, or to oppose them. I was an utter stranger
in my own city."

With minor alterations for local geography and updating of the ethnic groups,
this might be the lament of English-speaking whites of Miami in the 1980s, or
of the black and white populations of Los Angeles, confronting their newly
polyglot city.

Robert Hunter and his contemporaries had far more reason to feel like strangers
in their own land than most Americans do now. In their day the flow of
immigrants was far heavier, in both absolute and relative terms. Moreover, the
immigrants who were arriving in such numbers seemed more alien than even the
Cambodians and Salvadorans who have come during the 1980s. "The people who
opposed their entry—and they were more numerous and vociferous and seem to
have felt even more threatened than now—made the point that Catholics and Jews
were radically different," says Lawrence Fuchs, speaking of the New Immigration
era.

Certain parts of the United States have recently felt a localized impact
approximating that of the New Immigration. First on the list would be southern
Florida, which received the 125,000 Cuban and Haitian "special entrants" in the
course of one year; second, Los Angeles; and third, cities along the Mexican
border, such as Laredo and Del Rio, where the human ripples from Mexico's
economic catastrophe first touched the United States.

But through most of the country, the immigration of the past ten years has
meant a gradual change in proportions, rather than the introduction of
startlingly different populations that was so troubling early in the century.
Most Asian immigrants are concentrated in the western states, with nearly a
third of the nation's total in California alone. Although Asians are
increasingly numerous in California, they have been an evident part of the
state's population since the mid-nineteenth century, when Chinese contract
laborers were admitted to work on the railroads. Although Latin American
immigrants now also congregate in Chicago, Boston, New York, and other northern
cities, the greatest numbers of them have settled in the same southwestern
states where Mexicans and Mexican-Americans are part of the traditional ethnic
mix. Neither the Asian nor the Mexican ethnic group has always been welcomed by
the white majorities in these areas—the Chinese were the targets of
exclusionary laws in the nineteenth century—but they have been there through
the years, and their presence presumably blunts the shock effect of additional
immigration.

In short, historical comparison suggests that today's immigration should not
seem as threatening as the New Immigration did. The country was able to
overcome that great dislocation; will it not overcome this one? There is an
important qualifier to the confident assumption that it will, however.
Precisely because the warnings issued by the racial theorists were taken
seriously, the New Immigration came to an abrupt halt. With the passage of the
national-origins law of 1924, the ethnic balance of the American population was
supposed to be preserved. With the coming of the Depression, immigration ceased
to be an issue at all; during the 1930s, more people left the United States
than entered it. For more than forty years, until the immigration reforms of
1966, the U.S. had what Roger Conner, of FAIR, calls a "breathing space." The
cycles of the assimilative process were able to run undisturbed for more than a
generation, slowly bringing the masses of New Immigrants into American
culture.

Now there is no let-up in sight. Therefore, if there were signs that the
assimilative process was breaking down— that immigrants were not learning
English, that they could not participate successfully in economic and political
life—there would be grounds for fearing that the society could not bear the
strain of further immigration. But if the immigrants are, as all evidence
indicates, learning the national language, respecting the rules of political
participation, and proving victorious in the economic arena, then precisely
what threat do they pose? For better and for worse, America has always been an
open, fluid, commercial culture. It has embraced those willing to play the game
its way, and today's immigrants are as willing to do so as any of their
predecessors have been.

What of the embedded, "ineradicable" cultural differences that today's
immigrants may introduce? To judge them we must leave the realm of evidence and
enter that of faith. Either you believe that American society, which has
absorbed and adjusted to so much, will be overpowered by this new challenge, or
you do not. My own, purely anecdotal impression, shaped by stories like those
of the Nguyens and their Mexican and Korean and Haitian counterparts, is that
American culture will prove resilient. "I certainly don't think the shift from
Poles and Slavs to Koreans and Vietnamese is all that significant," the
historian Stephan Thernstrom, of Harvard, told Barry Siegel, of the Los Angeles
Times, last December. "That's not to say there are no strains, but nothing now
portends what the country went through in the mid-nineteenth century and the
start of the twentieth century."

We are left, then, with the nasty question of how much resistance to
immigration arises merely from color prejudice. Some of it undoubtedly does.
This is an atavistic emotion, part of American history and perhaps even of
human nature. But it is ugly and ignoble, and it deserves no reflection in
American law.

At the bottom of all fear of strangers, especially those of a different color,
is the idea that they will remain a culture apart, separated by race and
behavior and aspirations from the surrounding society. The most sobering
impression left by my exposure to today's immigrants—not at all what I started
out looking for— is the reminder that such a culture already exists, and it is
not made of those new to our shores.

Immigrants rarely get their start in the middle-class enclaves and the
high-rent districts. When they move to a city, they settle in today's
equivalents of New York's Lower East Side. In most cities, that means that
Cubans and Vietnamese are moving into areas that for at least a generation have
been home to American blacks. There they do their best to establish themselves.
Predominantly black areas of Long Beach, for example, are becoming centers for
Cambodian and Vietnamese merchants, doctors, and dentists. From such proximity,
poisonous relations have grown.

To many American blacks, it seems obvious that the immigrants, so new to the
country, have been more warmly treated than the blacks, who have been here all
along. Marvin Dunn, a black psychologist at Florida International University,
in Miami, says, "When the first wave of Cubans moved in, there was a deep
resentment at all the financial assistance and resettlement aid the government
was giving them, at the expense of social programs for people who had been
living here. Now there is resentment at a system that would prefer to hire
Haitians because they work more cheaply and complain less." Many blacks also
point out that the jobs as porters, maids, parking-lot attendants, and hotel
workers which their teenagers might otherwise hold are being filled by
immigrants.

For their part, Dunn says, "The Haitians have a sense that we complain too
much, that our children are out of control, that we don't do enough for
ourselves." From Asian refugees, from Cubans, from black-skinned immigrants
from the Caribbean, I heard blunt, ungenerous assessments of the black
Americans among whom they lived. The contrast is probably sharpest in Miami,
where, compared with American blacks, one immigrant group, the Cubans, is
economically so successful, and another, the Haitians, seems better loved by
the Anglo and Cuban communities, despite its dark skin. The Haitians may live
four to a room in ramshackle boarding houses; they may have difficulty finding
work, except on the labor gangs in central Florida's vegetable-growing regions.
Still, they seem hopeful, determined, convinced that they can make a better
life for themselves. "These Haitian families are very hardworking, moonlighting
two or three jobs," said a white woman who coordinates Creole bilingual
education at a heavily Haitian school. "They have a lot of confidence in the
system, they have a lot of trust in the schools. Much more so than many
American blacks, who have lost faith in the system."

The immigrants are on their way up, their children guaranteed a better life
simply because they will be raised in Los Angeles or Miami instead of Pnompenh
or Port-au-Prince. Their optimistic faith that hard work will be rewarded is
precisely what is lacking among the black teenagers and young mothers with whom
the immigrants share the inner-city streets.

Such an absence of faith cannot be incomprehensible when legalized segregation
is but one generation in the past, when extralegal discrimination lives on, and
when official policies, especially those built into the welfare system, imply
that such people cannot really be expected to take responsibility for their
fates. Still, the fact remains that the culture of the black underclass leaves
its members worse equipped for economic advancement than immigrants who start
out with less.

With some exceptions, such as the criminal minority among the Marielitos,
immigrants do not engage in crime and violence. Although fathers often leave
their wives and children behind when they migrate in search of work, they
typically send money home for support. When I asked young men from Mexico or
Haiti about the families they left behind, I usually got a detailed, up-to-date
report. Families that migrate together or form after migration are generally
stable. There is usually a father as well as a mother to provide an example to
the children and to discipline them. There are exceptions to all these
generalizations within the spectrum of immigrants, but most immigrants are
closer to the pattern the generalizations suggest than are most members of the
American black urban lower class.

Many black officials and intellectuals who fear that immigration is harming the
black lower class recite the economic arguments about depressed wage rates and
competition for entry-level jobs. But when they spoke to me with greatest
passion, they were not talking about immigrants at all. Rather, they were
explaining that their deepest fears arise from the cleavage within black
society.

"Some people seem to think that all blacks are poor and dispossessed," says
Marvin Dunn. "It's not true. There are two black Americas. One is doing very
well, better than ever. It is taking advantage of the system, moving up. The
other is getting larger as a group, and it is sinking deeper into the quagmire
of despair. That is the group that threatens the rest of America, black and
white."

It becomes a self-perpetuating system," Dunn says. People who have grown up in
single-parent families, especially boys without fathers, are less likely to
have a sense of family responsibility when they grow up. The high volume of
children who are growing up outside a family network could ultimately cause the
destruction of the black family structure."

"This is the black man's black problem," says T. Willard Fair, of the Miami
Urban League, an imposing, flamboyantly outspoken man with a shaved head. Fair
is a leading advocate of restricting immigration; he has allied himself with
Roger Conner's organization, FAIR. He argues that immigrants' gains have been
black Americans' losses, especially in Miami, where Cubans and Haitians have
made blacks politically and economically "dispensable" to whites. He has
recommended a one percent sales tax in Dade County to finance black
self-improvement. But, he says, though more money and fewer immigrants are
necessary conditions for black self-improvement, they will not be sufficient
unless the pathological culture of the black lower class is directly
confronted.

"White America created that problem," Fair says, "but they are not in a
position to solve it. I am concerned that we are on the verge of losing a
generation of children. They have no ambition, no hope for a better future.
They live for the now. We have got to understand that unless we [blacks] as a
people put some basic values back in place, all the other stuff we talk
about—the high joblessness, the housing shortage—won't mean anything."

Strictly speaking, the lower-class cultural problem is not directly connected
with immigration, except as the flow of willing foreign workers gives employers
even less incentive to find a place for black teenagers. But if our attitude
toward immigration ultimately turns on our notion of what makes a society
cohere, then it invites speculation about the other ingredients of cultural
cohesion. I, at least, have been left with the feeling that our major social
challenge will not be assimilating the Minhs and the Garzas, no matter how many
of them might come. Rather, it will be coming to terms with that part of
American society most estranged from the rest, giving its members a reason to
feel that they belong.

Twice in its history, the American government has undertaken a top-to-bottom
re-examination of its immigration laws. The first time, the process took more
than twenty years to complete. It began in 1907, with the appointment of the
Immigration Commission, chaired by Senator William Dillingham, of Vermont, and
continued through the late 1920s as successive "national origins" acts were
passed.

The Dillingham Commission was able to write on a blank slate; when it began its
celebrations, there was virtually no immigration law to revise. But by the time
Congress approved the creation of a Select Commission on Immigration and
Refugee Policy, in 1978, the immigration code had grown until it was exceeded
in complexity and length only by the internal-revenue laws.

The original chairman of the Select Commission was Reubin Askew, the former
governor of Florida. When he resigned, in 1979, to accept President Carter's
nomination as the U.S. trade representative, he was succeeded by Theodore
Hesburgh, the president of Notre Dame. The fifteen other members of the Select
Commission included four Cabinet members; four senators; four congressmen; and
a state supreme court judge, a labor leader, and an official of the Los Angeles
city government who were, respectively, of Mexican, Cuban, and Japanese
descent. In all, half of the Select Commission's members could trace their
lineage to the New Immigration. They included former Secretary of State Edmund
Muskie, former Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti, and former Representative
Elizabeth Holtzman. By contrast, all the members of the Dillingham Commission
were descendants of Englishmen or Scots.

The Select Commission held public hearings in a dozen cities, from Albany to
Phoenix. Like the Dillingham Commission, it hired scholars and consultants for
studies of the economic, linguistic, demographic, and cultural implications of
continued immigration. In March of 1981, it released its final report and
recommendations; since then, these have focused the political deliberations
about controlling immigration.

The legislative vehicle for the Select Commission's recommendations has been
the Simpson-Mazzoli bill, named for its two sponsors, Republican Senator Alan
K. Simpson, of Wyoming, who served on the Select Commission, and Democratic
Representative Romano L. Mazzoli, of Kentucky, who did not. The bill passed the
Senate last year, but a flurry of amendments kept it from coming to a vote in
the House. It died at the end of that congressional session, but was
reintroduced early this year. It has once again passed the Senate and is still
awaiting action in the House.

The premise of the Select Commission's report and of the Simpson-Mazzoli bill
is that legal immigration is good for the United States but illegal immigration
is bad. Immigrants work hard, save and invest, and create more jobs than they
take," said Theodore Hesburgh, when presenting the Select Commission's findings
to a congressional committee in 1981. "The children of immigrants, according to
our studies, acculturate well to American life and actually seem to be
healthier and to do better in school on the average than those of native-born
Americans." Therefore, "it is in the national interest of the United States to
accept a reasonable number of immigrants and refugees each year. . . regardless
of the color, nationality, or religion of those admitted." But illegal
immigration creates a climate of lawlessness. Its victims, Hesburgh said,
include not only the working-class Americans whose wages are depressed but the
illegal immigrants themselves ("the ones who are victimized by unscrupulous
employers, those who die in the desert, or in the ballast tanks of ships") and
those would-be immigrants denied admission ("the ones who are waiting patiently
in line for so many years to come to the United States through the normal legal
immigration channels").

Before this general principle can be applied to creating specific policies,
three questions must be answered. First, can the U.S. accept as many immigrants
as would like to come—that is, could it handle illegal immigration simply by
legalizing the entire flow? Second, if it must exclude some potential
immigrants, how can it most effectively do so? Third, how, then, should it
choose which immigrants to admit?

There is almost no dissent on question number one. The population of the Third
World nations is expected to increase by 1.6 billion in the next twenty years;
more than 80 million additional people will enter the Latin American labor
force before the end of this century. Perhaps Mexico will discover a way to
feed and employ its rapidly growing population; but for the moment the flow of
Mexican emigrants is on the rise. As Central America's population soars, its
nations are disrupted by warfare and revolution.

In the face of such pressures, the U.S. has no choice but to limit immigration.
The environmental consequences of a larger American population cannot be
conclusively proved. What can be proved is that successful absorption of
immigrants is largely a matter of proportion. The annual flow of legal
immigrants has ranged between 400,000 and 800,000 through the past decade. Even
those levels, so modest by comparison with the ones reached during the New
Immigration, have provoked widespread uneasiness and concern. The Select
Commission staff recommended that future net immigration be set at 750,000 a
year. But after the Cuban and Haitian landings of 1980, the commission decided
to recommend 500,000 a year, which was reflected in the original version of the
Simpson-Mazzoli bill.

If the purpose of the bill is to open the door to legal immigration, this seems
inordinately timid. Immigrants had a shock effect in 1980 because so many of
them arrived unexpectedly in so few places. Regular, legal immigration is far
less disturbing. If illegal immigration were more effectively limited, an
increase in legal immigration might be tolerated; we would have less reason to
fear that the situation was out of control. Relative to our current population
size, total immigration of 800,000 a year would be one third the rate during
the New Immigration; one million would be less than half as much. If immigrants
add vigor to our economy and culture, can we not accommodate half as large an
alien presence as our grandfathers did?

Still, as many as we choose to admit, more would desire to come. Somehow the
flow must be controlled, and there would be no shrinking from the realities
that implies. "Controlling immigration" means using the police and military
powers of the state to thwart the desires of human beings whose only fault is
having been born on the wrong side of a national border. There is no
alternative to exercising those powers, but they should be effective and
humane. Current practice is neither.

The main burden is placed on the Border Patrol, supplemented by sporadic
campaigns by the Immigration and Naturalization Service to detect pockets of
illegal aliens in garment factories, restaurants, and other employment centers.
The tools at the government's disposal are hardly fearsome to most. Although it
is a crime to "enter without inspection," the punishment in most cases is
deportation. For an immigrant from Nigeria or Korea, this is a serious sanction
(and an expensive one for the U.S. government which pays the air fare back
home). For Mexicans apprehended at or near the border, it is not. For them,
deportation usually means a ride in a Border Patrol bus back to the river, and
another attempt the next day.

Although illegal immigrants may be arrested if found in an American workplace,
the employer who hires them faces no penalty whatsoever. The immigration code
imposes a $2,000 fine or up to five years in jail on anyone who "conceals,
harbors, or shields from detection" an illegal alien, but thanks to a clause
known as the "Texas proviso," passed at growers' insistence in 1952, hiring an
illegal immigrant "shall not be deemed to constitute harboring."

The Census Bureau estimates that 500,000 illegal aliens enter each year. That
does not mean that the alien population grows by 500,000 a year, because a
large but unknown number come temporarily as sojourners. Researchers from the
University of Texas have attempted to estimate the number of Mexicans here
illegally by seeing how many people (especially working-age males) disappeared
unaccountably from the Mexican population between one Mexican census and the
next. They determined that between 1.5 and 4.0 million Mexicans were illegally
in the U.S. in 1980, which is a smaller number than has been suggested by
"certain non-empirically based speculations on the subject."

Since the illegal immigrants themselves cannot be directly counted, the
government pays attention to the things it can count—especially the number of
people the Border Patrol manages to stop on the way in. This figure has soared.
In 1965, the Border Patrol and the INS located about 110,000 "deportable
aliens," mainly through efforts at the border. (The Border Patrol attempts to
prevent illegal entry at the border; the INS supervises legal entry there and
is in charge of "area control" in cities away from the border.) By 1970, the
agencies found more than 320,000, and through the late 1970s they apprehended
roughly one million illegal aliens per year, more than 90 percent of them from
Mexico. After the peso devaluation of 1982, border stations reported another
sharp rise in the number of people apprehended. In the Border Patrol's El Paso
sector, for example, the number rose by 33 percent between August of 1981 and
August of 1982. Through the first eight months of 1983, apprehensions were well
above the 1982 levels.

Such increases reflect the increased pressures driving people out of Mexico and
Central America. But the figures are also subject to bureaucratic distortions.
As Border Patrol officials are the first to point out, a woman crossing for the
day to work as a maid in El Paso looks just the same on the records as a young
man from Nicaragua nearing the end of his thousand-mile pilgrimage north. The
least significant immigrants—the thousands of day laborers who trudge across
the Rio Grande as dawn breaks each day—are the easiest to catch. In border
cities like El Paso, the Border Patrol can arrest virtually as many of these
casual crossers as it chooses. When political attention is focused on
apprehension figures, this is the way to build totals with less effort than is
required to break immigrant-smuggling operations or to "cut sign"—that is, to
track small bands of intruders through the mountains and desert.

Border Patrol officials also point out that apprehension totals omit the
crucial return-migration figure. While visiting border stations in Texas and
California late last year, I was told that northward activity might be light.
The main flow would be to the south, back home for the holidays.

But even when all the limits to statistical precision have been noted, Border
Patrol officials are unanimous in saying that more illegal immigrants are
attempting to come. The conventional political wisdom is that the Border Patrol
is doomed to impotence in controlling the flow. With 2,000 miles of unfortified
border to survey and a total work force of 2,600, no more than 450 of whom are
patrolling at one time, the Border Patrol is said to be hopelessly outmatched.
"There is not enough money in the federal budget to have the Border Patrol
stand arm in arm for 2,000 miles, which is what it would take," says Henry
Cisneros, of San Antonio.

My own observations of border patrol activities left me moderately more
optimistic about the patrol's potential. Yes, the border is vast, and no, it
will never be sealed. When I asked Border Patrol and INS officials in El Paso
and San Diego whether a very patient immigrant could be absolutely certain of
penetrating, the answer was always yes. As I moved down the hierarchy, I heard
increasingly skeptical estimates of how much of the flow was being stopped. The
station chiefs and district directors said they thought that their men caught
one illegal immigrant in two or three. In the vans patrolling "the line," I
heard estimates of one in four to one in eight—and everyone was guessing. The
old hands said that new patrolmen had to get used to the idea that it was just
a job. You had to go out and serve your eight hours and do what you could. If
you thought about all the ones who got through, you would soon burn out.

Nonetheless, it was also clear that the Border Patrol, however porous, made a
big difference by its mere presence, much as highway patrolmen affect the speed
of traffic even though they could never arrest everyone going over 55. Most of
the activity is concentrated in a few well-known areas. Although the E1 Paso
sector, second busiest after Chula Vista, south of San Diego, is responsible
for 341 miles of border, 86 percent of the illegal entrants it apprehends cross
in a ten-mile stretch around E1 Paso.

This is not the same thing as saying that 86 percent of all crossings are made
in those ten miles, but it can hardly be surprising that immigration is
heaviest in urban areas. In the El Paso sector, where the border arbitrarily
divides one large urban population into the American city of El Paso and the
Mexican city of Juarez, a Mexican who makes it the first fifty yards in from
the border has the hardest part of his journey behind him. Once away from the
river, he can mingle in street scenes dominated by Mexican and Mexican-American
faces (300,000 of Juarez's one million residents have credentials to cross the
border legally every day). The Border Patrolmen pride themselves on being able
to pick out illegal immigrants by their dress and demeanor—everyone else will
look at a Border Patrol car as it drives by, they say, whereas an illegal
immigrant will suddenly stare at a lamp post—but the chances of blending in
are better here than in the desert.

Perhaps because all sides realize that so many are getting through, there is a
routinized, almost casual air to the Border Patrol's dealings with immigrants
in El Paso. As I sat alongside the pilot in a Border Patrol helicopter, he
relentlessly tracked a limping Mexican man and two Mexican women carrying
string shopping bags, flushing them from a housing development where they
attempted to hide, pinning them in a cul-de-sac as a van roared through the
streets to apprehend them. The drama and terror of such a moment, or of the
nighttime chases on foot through back alleys, seemed lost on the patrolmen—and
on their quarry, as well. Each was doing his job; they would probably meet
again, in the same way. Five minutes after tracking down the three, the
helicopter pilot was chuckling as he buzzed a stocky Mexican man standing
knee-deep in the Rio Grande. "We call him the old capitalist," the pilot said
of the man, who had his trousers rolled up and was carrying others across the
river piggyback. "He keeps regular hours, goes on vacation with his wife. As
long as he stays in the river, we can't touch him."

There are higher stakes for both sides in Chula Vista, the busiest part of the
border. Fewer of the immigrants are day-crossers. This is the northern terminus
of a long migration path up the Mexican interior; a hundred miles farther north
lie the incalculable opportunities of Los Angeles. In the Border Patrol's
favor, the "line" does not split a city here. For at least a mile north of the
border, open fields constitute a no-man's land. From a hilltop with a view of
the border, patrolmen spend nights peering through infrared scopes, looking for
the bright-green patterns that are would-be immigrants huddling in a riverbed
or crawling through the grass. The scopes, originally designed for Army tanks,
are probably more effective for the Border Patrol, since its targets can do so
little to conceal themselves or to disrupt the Patrol's activities.

Almost a thousand people a day are apprehended in this sector; in the course of
several hours on the hilltop, I watched patrolmen pick out a group of crawling
or running green shapes every few minutes and then, by radio, guide patrolmen
on horseback to intercept them. Unlike E1 Paso's sojourners, many of these
people tried to escape. They seemed desperate at having been caught. It was an
ugly and sobering business; this is what the abstraction of "controlling the
border" really means. But it also suggested that the Border Patrol can be more
than a fig leaf. The crucial variable, as with the police, seems to be
presence, and more presence requires more money. The least controversial part
of the Simpson-Mazzoli bill is its recommendation that the Border Patrol be
beefed up.

While a stronger border patrol might further restrict illegal immigration, it
will not stop it. All parties to the political debate agree that poor people
will continue to come to a rich country until life in their homeland
improves.

Some claim that if international poverty is the ultimate cause of immigration,
coping with poverty is the cure. Thus Senator Gary Hart, of Colorado, has said
that immigration policy is really foreign policy. By encouraging economic
development, we can reduce the pressures that drive people to our shores.
Logically and ethically appealing as this approach may be, it is also utterly
unrealistic, at least as the centerpiece of immigration policy. Through all its
decades of providing foreign aid, the U.S. has helped other nations grow more
wheat and produce more steel, but it has been spectacularly unsuccessful in
sponsoring large job-creation projects in the Third World.

As its answer to illegal immigration, the Select Commission recommended the
step that has become the most hotly contended feature of the Simpson-Mazzoli
bill: "employer sanctions," which would undo the Texas proviso—that is, make
it a crime to hire illegal immigrants.

The case in favor of employer sanctions is that jobs are the magnet for illegal
immigrants, and if the jobs disappear, so will the incentive to migrate.
Technical arguments rage about the circumstances in which limited
employer-sanction programs have or have not proven effective in Europe or in
certain American states. But there is a commonsense connection between
restricting jobs and restricting illegal immigration. Illegal immigrants told
me that the one place they had to produce plausible documents in order to be
hired was southern Florida. (Elsewhere, employers asked at most for Social
Security numbers and immigrants provided fake documents, a ruse expedient for
both sides. ) Miami was also the only place where I saw illegal immigrants who
had trouble finding work.

"The chief attraction of employer sanctions for me is that it controls jobs
rather than people," the economist Michael Piore told a congressional committee
in 1981. "I think it is more humane in general....Most undocumented immigrants
come to work....If you could eliminate work opportunities, you would therefore
stop the basic attraction. People do develop attachments to this
country....Once those attachments develop, it becomes extremely cruel and, I
think, in a fundamental sense, inhuman, to expel them."

Under the Simpson-Mazzoli bill, those entitled to work legally in the United
States would have to carry some sort of identification. The bill leaves the
details of the identification system vague and asks the President to report on
different options within three years.

Three groups have formed an unlikely alliance to oppose this plan. Together,
they were responsible for keeping the Simpson-Mazzoli bill from coming to a
vote in the House last year. Business interests, including agricultural
growers, claim that checking credentials will be yet another intolerable
regulatory burden. Their real objection, especially in the case of the growers,
seems to be the loss of a hardworking part of the labor force. In deference to
growers' interests, the Simpson-Mazzoli bill includes a plan under which
foreign laborers can be temporarily imported, usually for farm work.

Civil libertarians, including the American Civil Liberties Union, view the
national identity card as another dangerous infringement on individual rights
and privacy. "A secure verification system could very likely be built on a
national data bank which would centralize personal data about all persons
authorized to work in the United States," John Shattuck, of the ACLU, told a
congressional committee last year.

To such assertions, Senator Simpson has replied that the national identity card
would be nothing more than a forge-proof record of a Social Security number,
which is already required when accepting most jobs, opening a bank account,
registering at many universities, and participating in other aspects of modern
life. How would civil liberties be harmed, he asks, by a more authentic card?
Are they not more gravely threatened by continuing to encourage the flow of
immigrants who live outside the full protection of the law?

Finally, Hispanic organizations oppose employer sanctions, arguing that a
crackdown on illegal immigrants will become a crackdown on anyone who looks
Hispanic. "Well meaning employers, fearful of government sanctions, will shy
away from hiring us," says Vilma Martinez, of the Mexican American Legal
Defense and Educational Fund. "Racist or biased employers will simply use the
fear sanctions as an excuse to avoid hiring us."

The supporters of the bill contend that, on the contrary, a universal identity
card will protect Hispanic Americans. Since everyone will have to present his
identity card, Flanigan as well as Rodriguez, the Hispanic will have ironclad
proof of his right to hold the job. (Under the Simpson-Mazzoli bill, the
employer would be obliged to ask for the card, and once it was presented, he
would be obliged to accept it as proof of legally admitted status.) This has
not convinced the Hispanic organizations, who represent the most formidable
opposition to the Simpson-Mazzoli bill. Their arguments so persuaded Senator
Edward Kennedy, of Massachusetts, that he became the only member of the Senate
Judiciary Committee to vote against the Simpson-Mazzoli bill. The way out of
this standoff may be through modifications of the bill, such as those proposed
by Gary Hart. He has sponsored an amendment that would impose stiff penalties
on employers who discriminate against employees on the basis of "national
origin."

As a complement to its crackdown on illegal immigration, the Simpson-Mazzoli
bill proposes an amnesty for illegal aliens who are already here. Anyone who
could prove that he had been in the country since before a certain cutoff date
would be granted the status of having been legally admitted. Under the current
Senate version of the Simpson-Mazzoli bill, anyone here before January 1, 1977,
would immediately qualify for permanent-resident status, and anyone here before
January 1, 1980, would qualify for temporary-resident status, which could be
converted to permanent-resident status if the immigrant demonstrated competence
in English within two years. The bill has not yet passed the House, and the
House version includes amendments that would push the 1977 date forward to
1982.

We're never going to see again in this country what we saw in 1954 with
Operation Wetback," says Alan Eliason, the Border Patrol chief in E1 Paso,
speaking of the last large-scale attempt to round up illegal immigrants. "We
are not going to go out and try to locate and deport several million illegal
aliens. We don't have the resources. People won't stand for it. It's not going
to happen." Senator Simpson also says that amnesty is inseparable from the
basic goal of immigration reform: ending the two-class society in which some
immigrants live outside the shelter of the law.

The major opposition to amnesty now comes from local governments. Once
immigrants are free to step out of the shadows, it is argued, they will demand
more public assistance. But if Orange County, California, or Dade County,
Florida, or Bexar County, Texas, ends up bearing an unfair burden for this
change in national policy, the federal government should offer reimbursement.
It is no solution at all to pretend that the U.S. will ever evict the millions
of legal immigrants who have already arrived.

That leaves the final question about immigration policy: Of the many who hope
to come, how shall the U.S. choose which to accept? Admissions fall into two
categories—normal immigrants and refugees—and each presents painful
choices.

In addition to changing the ethnic mix among immigrants, the reforms of 1965
placed a higher value on family reunification. Before, under the
McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, skilled workers had an advantage in qualifying for
admission. Since 1965, potential immigrants have been considered in three
tiers. First come the immediate relatives of U.S. citizens, defined as spouses,
children under twenty-one, or parents of citizens over twenty-one, who are
admitted without limit.

Next come less immediate relatives, who have first claim within the annual
ceilings of 20,000 immigrants per country and 270,000 from the entire world.
Places within these "numerically limited" categories are assigned according to
six preference categories, four of which are for relatives. First preference is
for unmarried adult children of U.S. citizens; second for spouses and unmarried
children of permanent-resident aliens; fourth for married children of U.S.
citizens; and fifth for brothers and sisters of adult U.S. citizens. Together,
these members of the extended family accounted for 190,000 of the numerically
limited admissions in 1978.

Finally, there are immigrants without family ties to the United States, who, as
a whole, have far bleaker chances of admission. Some qualify for third
preference, professionals and people of "exceptional ability in the sciences or
the arts"; otherwise they are relegated to sixth preference, workers in
occupations with labor shortages, or to "non-preference," which is everyone
else. In 1978, some 14,000 occupational-preference immigrants were admitted,
along with their spouses and children, 16,000 in number. Only 54,000 people
were admitted as non-preference immigrants or through "private bills," special
legislation admitting immigrants one by one.

A sane immigration policy would continue the emphasis on reuniting immediate
families. It is harder to see the justification for devoting so much of the
limited quotas to members of the extended family. Admissions systems are
inevitably arbitrary, but this is more so than most. It bestows benefits on
certain families simply because an uncle or a cousin managed to immigrate in
the past. It closes the door on the classic immigrant, the independent man or
woman who sets out to make a new life. As of 1980, Mexico had a backlog of
173,000 non-preference visa applications; worldwide, 280,000 non-preference
applications were pending. They will be considered only after the 807,000
preference-category applications are handled—which is to say, never. In
recognition of this imbalance, and in an attempt to open the door to new "seed
immigrants," the Select Commission proposed reducing the quotas for the
extended family and increasing them for independent immigrants. Why not follow
the logic to its conclusion? Keep the places for immediate family members, and
open the rest of the queue to independent immigrants.

Refugees and applicants for political asylum present the most painful choices
of all. The 1965 Immigration Act reserved 6 percent, or 17,400 per year, of the
numerically limited visas for refugees. Under the Refugee Act of 1980, the
annual limit was raised to 50,000. But that law also gave the President
enormous leeway in admitting refugees, and in fiscal years 1980 and 1981
President Carter determined that more than 200,000 refugees should be accepted,
specifying a ceiling of 168,000 each year from Indochina and 33,000 from the
Soviet Union.

If the major enforcement problem for the INS is stopping Mexican immigrants at
the border, its major administrative problem is handling the claims for refugee
status and political asylum filed by Haitians and Salvadorans. Almost none of
the claims have been approved; fewer than one hundred Salvadorans, for example,
have been granted asylum.

One technical obstacle to the Haitian and Salvadoran claims is that the Refugee
Act of 1980 applies only to those who have already fled their homeland for some
country of first asylum other than the United States. "Vietnamese in Thailand
is eligible, but a Haitian who lands in Miami is not. He may apply for
political asylum, but he must prove, like candidates for refugee status, that
he is "unable or unwilling" to go home "because of persecution or a
well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality,
membership in a particular social group, or political opinion." In principle,
this might be read to include almost anyone subject to the generalized
oppression of Third World governments. In practice, it covers almost anyone who
wants to leave the Soviet Union or its satellites, including Cuba, and precious
few others besides the Indochinese.

The stories told by Haitian and Salvadoran "refugees" lack the crisp
distinctions implied by the law. A few give convincing testimony that specific
revenge awaits them if they go home. A larger number say that life there would
be worse than it is in the United States. They are, of course, correct; and
that is the ugly reality of our refugee policy. Most of the world's population
lives under some kind of repression. Even though America's upraised torch of
liberty is the noblest part of its role in the world, the U.S. cannot provide a
new home for all of the oppressed. To whom, then, should it offer shelter?

The policy would seem less arbitrary if it were more narrowly focused. The
United States should accept as refugees those who have been political prisoners
or have been singled out for persecution. In addition, we have a special
responsibility in situations like Vietnam's, in which our policies have
directly affected foreigners' lives. (Some who advocate asylum for Salvadorans
say that the same reasoning should apply there, because of past and present
U.S. influence in that country.) For the rest, the U.S. should make more room
in its overall immigration quotas, offering a less arbitrary chance to the
millions around the world who hope for a better life and who could, in
unexpected ways, make our lives better too.

About the Author

James Fallows is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and has written for the magazine since the late 1970s. He has reported extensively from outside the United States and once worked as President Carter's chief speechwriter. His latest book is China Airborne.

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